In case you haven’t seen it, several readers wrote in to tell us about how the “journalists” at Gizmodo went around CES disabling video screens. The invention used to do it — the TV-B-Gone — is capable of far more worthy goals, like disabling the invasive crap on Fox News at an airport. (Addendum: unless anyone mistakes me as someone brave enough to operate a TV-B-Gone, see comments. I’m not. I’m a wimp. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume this could be used for good.) Here, Gizmodo simply tortures presenters at press events they were invited to. Cool? Uh, no, not particularly.

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Now, we like mischief us much as the next guy. But randomly killing displays? Consensus of the CDMers I’ve talked to is that this is more wrong than funny — not to mention, we don’t need any special technology to have fancy flat-panel displays stop working. Worse, bloggers fighting for credibility have to deal with the antics of the Gizmodo crew (see cnet Crave’s take on that) — and this could unfairly vilify a wonderful invention. After all, the beauty of TV-B-Gone is that it gives people control over invasive TVs in their environment. This prank did the opposite.

I think we need a code of TV-B-Gone ethics: disable the TV screens that are asking for it, folks.

Dan Reetz points out that a previous blogger at Gizmodo (we can’t say whom, as it seems to date from a period without bylines in 2004), said of the TV-B-Gone creator “Mitch Altman is an asshole,” and that “the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.” Prophetic words.

Game Mod was a workshop by Steph Thirion in Barcelona last month. The idea: take code for a simple game of Breakout, rendered in Processing, and mess it up so it looks like art. The surprise: participants weren’t programmers, and they got results in minutes rather than long hours.

Game Mod [Project page, descriptions, code, video]

The task of each participant was to create a mod of the game: dig into the code, change its looks and behaviours, search for unexpected results.

…
Graphic design students, with almost no previous experience in coding, were pushed head first into object oriented programming. They discovered that in the complex system of a game program, change can lead to unexpected and beautiful results, and their lack of knowledge of the tool was more a creativity boost than it was a limitation.

Of course, the advantage here: there was source code to start with. And as I have to keep telling my students, starting with code examples is a good idea. (That’s why experienced coders do it.) This Breakout is a little different, in that balls bounce off all the walls in sort of an “everybody wins” version of the game — perfect for visualists.

Okay, non-coders — and coders — are you up to the challenge? You can download the code from the project page above and try it yourself. I like the idea of giving a time limit and not thinking about it too much. Maybe some instant sketching in Processing every day isn’t a bad idea.