Justin Hall has been getting beyond his grandfather of bloggers era. For the past two years, he’s been working toward his Masters at the increasingly interesting Annenberg Center at USC.

Click on the picture of Justin (excellent hairdo, Justin) to view a Quicktime video of him explaining to our friends at Aula the “passively multiplayer online game” he’s working on at USC.

Passively Multiplayer Online Games

Description

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous people, gangsters, soldiers.

Summary:

A system for using user data and device-use history to generate avatars and/or game moves in an online multiuser environment.

Documentation: