I was planning on writing about the reasons behind the recent decline in Facebook platform developers, but there's another story that I've been mulling over for a little while for it's absurdity.

In his 20s, Guy Debord began to develop what would end up being an elaborate, chess-like war simulation game. The late 70s saw this game released in limited quantities, with a book following a decade later. As non sequitur as this may at first seem coming from the author of The Society of the Spectace, it does go hand in hand with that text's inherent longing for a simpler epoch.

Regardless, Alex Galloway - who teaches at NYU and whose work I've written about a number of times on this blog - created an online version of the game called Kriegspiel in an effort with the Radical Software Group. Galloway has been looking into real-time strategy games such as Starcraft for some time now as an expression of - if not metaphor for - network culture, so such a move on his part would seem largely academic in nature.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that Galloway and NYU received a threat of a IP infringement lawsuit from Debord's widow. Surely she sees the absurdity in taking such a strict stance in defending the intellectual property rights of a seminal member of the Situationist International? If not that, then she at least could recognize that Galloway's repositioning of her dead husband's game can only serve to nurture its success - at least as much as a game heralded for its opaque complexity can be judged so.

Then again what more bitingly appropriate way to remember Debord than for both sides to conjure multiple signifying representations of the deceased thinker.