Infovore » 2011 » November

New tables – Hubbub

I really like the Hubbub tables.

(tags: tables design offices hubbub )

Kill Screen – My Purple-Haired Made-Up Best Friend, and Why She Had to Die

"I only got to hang out with Rachael once: in San Francisco, for a week, during the Game Developers Conference…

Here’s how we did it: She shared my eyes and ears, and she wrote her impressions through my laptop and my BlackBerry. When we touched down at SFO, she wrote the first tweet, and she eavesdropped on the game designers that I sat with riding into town on the BART. We were working press—except I was the one sweating the deadlines, and looking for good ideas, while she was just loving it…" Chris Dahlen on writing pixelvixen707

(tags: games transmedia writing chrisdahlen marketing args pixelvixen707 )

HULK PRESENTS: THE MYTH OF 3 ACT STRUCTURE « FILM CRIT HULK! HULK BLOG!

"THIS LITTLE WAY SHAKESPEARE ESCALATING THE STAKES AND POSITIONING THE ENDGAME = THE SAME EXACT WAY HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITERS HANDLE THE ENTIRE MIDDLE PARTS OF THEIR GODDAMN MOVIE.

NO WONDER THEY AIMLESS AND BORING." Film Crit Hulk is brilliant.

(tags: writing structure screenplays format filmcrithulk beats shakespeare )
Kill Screen – Fallout New Vegas DLC Review

"…you play other roles than “protagonist.” That there are other ways of seeing." Very good.

(tags: writing agency games fallout )
Re: RFC Convert builin mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library.

"Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C." Linus doesn't like C++.

(tags: c git programming linustorvalds )

Sycorax: Bring Fictional Characters to Life on Twitter

"Sycorax is a Twitter client, written in Python, that choreographs the online behavior of fictional characters. Other tweet schedulers make your personal Twitter stream look like a clockwork robot is behind it, posting tweets at the optimal time for penetration into your social network. Syxorax lets fictional characters use Twitter the way real people do. Your characters can post at odd hours and talk to each other, taking their lines from a simple script you write, but without any ongoing work from you." Very nice.

(tags: storytelling twitter narrative script programming )

Grand Theft Auto and Kantian Ethics | D Nye Everything

"The tragedy of Nico Belic is that, narratologically and in terms of the game mechanic, he can never stop using people as a means rather than an end."

(tags: games gtaiv kant ethics )

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

"Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?" Yes, good.

(tags: design interaction hands glowingrectangles )

[REDACTED] The Dominant Cultural Form of the 21st Century – Click Nothing

"Film and television are in many ways a technological enhancement and hybridization of older broadcast media, such as the novel, the play, or the album, but they are still fundamentally part of the broadcast culture paradigm. Games, I believe, are not part of the same paradigm. Games belong to a different paradigm that includes the oral tradition of storytelling, improvisational music, sport, dance, philosophical debate, improv theatre, and parlour games (among many other cultural forms)." A tiny fragment of a great post from Clint (which is really, really wanting to make me return to Far Cry 2 soon).

(tags: games culture media clinthocking interactivity authorship )

Links & notes for this month

- russell davies: little printer, big ambition
  "...one point I wanted to make, to all those agencies that have decided that making products is the future. That's a laudable and intelligent aim, but it took five years for BERG to go from here to here. And they're really good. They had to be focused and ambitious, working really hard. This isn't stuff you can just chuck out the back of a creative technology department Just a thought." Yeah, there is that.
  (tags: russelldavies berg littleprinter quality effort labour )
- Little Printer | BERG Cloud
  "Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper." Little Printer sees the light of day. So, so excited to finally see it in the world; can't wait to see it in other homes. (And: beautiful work on the design - industrial, brand, web, the whole package).
  (tags: berg littleprinter social printing papernet product )
- ClickToPlugin & ClickToFlash Safari extensions
  "ClickToPlugin is a lightweight and highly customizable extension that prevents Safari from launching plug-ins automatically, resulting in faster browsing, reduced fan usage, and increased battery life. It replaces every plug-in object by an unobtrusive placeholder that can be clicked to load the embedded content. Further, it can replace many plug-in-based media players by Safari’s native HTML5 media player." Installed.
  (tags: flash plugins safari mac extension )
- njonsson/cape - GitHub
  Cape solves a surprisingly common problem: I have this big bunch of rake tasks; I'd like them to run on the server, which tends to mean writing cap tasks just to run the rake tasks. Cape makes it easy to just mirror them.
  (tags: capistrano rails rake ruby )
- On Now and Next | booktwo.org
  "Sitting quietly on my kitchen table, it has already changed my radio behaviour: instead of sticking one channel on and leaving it for hours, I surf—but intelligently, discovering things I actually want to hear. Adding pictures to the radio: but just a single, little, useful one." Nice.
  (tags: stml jamesbridle radio glanceable tablet )
- Customer Service Romance - See Jayne
  "I built a working prototype of a Customer Service phone bot that has personal issues she'd like to talk about and over time falls in love with the caller. She uses the tools at her disposal (discounts, upgrades, hold music, confirmation numbers) to communicate her feelings towards you as best she can." Hah!
  (tags: robots bots phones support fiction design )
- inessential.com: Pub Rules
  "I’d love to run, edit, and write for a publication bigger than just me and my blog. I don’t have time, so I won’t, at least not any time soon. But if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules:" These are all correct. Also: they apply to everything from a blog upwards, frankly.
  (tags: writing publishing blogs web brentsimmons )
- Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: Stratford 2031
  "A 1.5km circle; over 10km of shops. 1500 in fact – including 4 “compass” Starbucks (not including roaming franchised coffeebots). Infinite mall." Chris channels his inner bizarro-world JG Ballard to predict the Mall Event Horizon.
  (tags: malls shopping retail consumer malleventhorizon )
- Twitter Bot Info | muffinlabs.com
  An excellent selection of auto-response bots.
  (tags: twitter fiction bots robothumour )
- Kill Screen - In Brief: Who Rules the Rules?
  " If real human players are serving as the authority, the spirit of the rules is intact even if they are not followed literally. Rules are checked for reference when a debate comes up about a certain ability or tactic, but they are not a constant authority. There’s a certain flexibility present when the players have the final say on what is acceptable. They only bend the rules when it makes the game more fun." This is very good: textualism versus contextualism.
  (tags: games writing rules systems context killscreen lbjeffries )
- The Day Alan Turing Came Out
  A lovely, sad, tiny story by Leonard.
  (tags: leonardrichardson alanturing history sf sciencefiction writing )
- The Making of Knowledge Navigator
  "A short while into the process of making these videos, Alan Kay said, “The main question here is not is this technology probable but is this the way we want to use technology?” One effect of the video was engendering a discussion (both inside Apple and outside) about what computers should be like." On video not needing to be realistic to be useful.
  (tags: probable possible apple computing marketing concept )
- “Sometimes the stories are the science…” – Blog – BERG
  "We are making a model of how a product is, to the degree that we can in video. We subject it to as much rigour as we can in terms of the material and technological capabilities we think can be built. It must not be magic, or else it won’t feel real. I guess I’m saying sufficiently-advanced technology should be distinguishable from magic." This is a lovely pulling-together of things from Matt J, and really manages to express the notions of "physics" and "rulesets" that I always enjoyed so much.
  (tags: berg design film rules physics )
- Hacking Carbon Emissions into Minecraft
  "When you burn some wood in a furnace, the mod calls out to AMEEconnect to do a calculation, and adds the result to a tracker in-game. As the carbon ticks up, the environment gets more and more polluted as the skies go dark and the clouds come down. OK, not entirely accurate, but an effective visual indicator!" Fun.
  (tags: amee minecraft modding data games )
- Kinect: Disneyland Adventures Review • Eurogamer.net
  "Nine hours in, with no end to the fetching and photographing and fishing and flower-watering in sight, I suggested to one of my nieces, who was playing the game with me (the whole thing's drop-in co-op friendly), that maybe collecting three pepper pots to make Monstro the Whale sneeze was not so very different to collecting three sets of banners for the Toon Town election. It turns out that, from the perspective of a six-year-old, it's entirely different, and I clearly understand little about whales and even less about elections." A marvellous, marvellous piece of writing from Christian (again).
  (tags: games kinect disneyland children play christiandonlan )
- My Thoughts on Free-to-Play Games - Chris Hecker's Website
  "However, if you are making a sustainable living doing pay-up-front games, and you find those are the kinds of games you are most passionate about, but you feel the itch to try out free-to-play because some other people are getting rich doing it, then I'd take a step back and examine your motives and what makes you fulfilled as a person. VC-types look down on this kind of thinking with the awesomely cynical term "lifestyle business", but isn't that exactly what we want to create, a business that supports our desired lifestyle, which includes making games we're proud of?" Chris Hecker on Free-to-Play
  (tags: games business freetoplay chrishecker )
- Patient BW, DOB 2/16/1971 — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen
  "Patient explained most of these (and most subsequent) injuries as being the result of membership in a private and apparently quite intense mixed martial arts club. Patient has denied being the victim of domestic abuse by Mr. Grayson following indirect and direct questioning on numerous occasions." Patient BW's medical records make for iiinteresting reading.
  (tags: batman comics medicine brucewayne )
- Culture Desk: The Video Game Art of Fumito Ueda : The New Yorker
  "...the world of Shadow of the Colossus is seemingly empty, except for the colossi and the warrior. Until you reach a colossus, there is no music, leaving you alone with your thoughts and the sound of your horse’s hooves. No enemies jump out to attack, it occurred to me on one of these rides, because I am the one on the hunt. The natural order of a video game is reversed. There are no enemies because I am the enemy." A decent enough piece on Ueda's games for the New Yorker - but this paragraph is marvellous.
  (tags: games fumitoueda art interaction narrative )
- New tables – Hubbub
  I really like the Hubbub tables.
  (tags: tables design offices hubbub )

Links & notes for this month

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