e488 — Fight. For Your Right. To Pla-aaay!

Neon Pac-Man with neon ghosts Pinky and Inky mounted on a brick wall. — Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Published 4 November 2024

e488 with Andy & Michael M — video game emulation, AI chat with gardens & articles, watch-based translation, an Oregon Trail movie and a whole lot more!

Michael M and Andy start off the show with a couple of stories dealing with the recent ruling by the US Copyright Office to deny an exemption to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to allow video game archivists to share scholarly access to games over the internet. See the show notes for links to the arguments and make your decision.

One of the reasons why such access to games is that some of these games are no longer commercially available, and the impact games have on society is enormous. An article in The Guardian picks up on the importance of playing games and justifies them simply because games “are an invitation to break free from the tyranny of efficiency.” Andy and Michael were hard pressed to attempt to disagree. Spoiler alert – they did not disagree. The co-hosts also note the reference in the article to Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken. Check out a short video of her explanation for why games matter in the show notes below.

Moving right along to AI and spatial collaboration, the co-hosts pick up an article discussing the recently wrapped WebexOne conference from Cisco, taking a closer look at the AI and spatial computing enhancements included in Cisco’s web conferencing software.

Turning from conversing with people, next up is a conversation with a garden. Andy and Michael consider a Small Garden Model (vs a Large Language Model), which will be included in the Chelsea Flower Show in 2025. This AI enhanced garden will allow the visitor to interact with the plants and a myriad of sensors in the garden in an entirely new way. Coming back to interacting with people, Andy shares a bit about his upcoming trip to Japan, and how he might use the translation app on his Apple Watch. One of the features of this application is the ability to download languages to the watch in case he does not have an internet connection when he needs the real-time translation functionality.

Switching to another app, Andy shares his experience in beta testing Particle.news, an AI powered news aggregator that writes an overview of multiple articles on a topic. Particle also allows you to “chat” with the articles and even have it create an “opposite side” summary. As an example for the episode, one of the stories surfaced via Particle deals with an upcoming comedy movie based on the 1970s computer game, the Oregon Trail. Another historic game surfaces in the conversation – Speedball.

The team wraps up the episode with the planned spin down of botsin-space, which has been the home of the Games at Work fediverse bot. Michael M shares that he will be on an AI panel for the Business of Healthcare conference next Friday at the University of North Carolina.

Should the US Copyright Office allow internet accessible video game software emulation? How would you hold your wrist to have a translation conversation with your watch and another person? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!