Ian Schreiber's ten week course notes. Lots to get stuck into here.

"I see Valve Software today holding the same position in the overall media landscape that Marvel Comics occupied in the early-mid 1960s. In both cases, we have two experienced studios, neither the mainstream-recognized giants of their fields, who made an unusual decision: they chose to spend the creative capital gained from prior commercial success to quietly revolutionize their respective medium's dominant genres, rather than take the safer path of grinding out more derivative sameness."

Ben Zeigler's notes on Bunge's Jaime Griesemer's talk at GDC, all about balancing. Sample quotation: "It can be tricky to balance, because designers can misinterpret competence (getting good at a weapon) with the weapon being balanced. We CANNOT use our intuition at this stage because it will lie to us. Changes will have to be done in larger batches, and we need to avoid bias effects." Really, the whole thing is jampacked with interesting stuff (not all of which I agree with, but most of it is very good indeed).

"In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever… Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval." Good article on how the economics of pinball are wired into the machine.

Lots of free FCE plugins, including some to rescale D90 footage and make it look a lot better.

"It turns out that Final Cut (both Express and Pro) don’t fully support the version of Motion JPEG that the D90 is using in AVI files, so the footage needs to be converted to Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple ProRes before editing." This makes things much better.

On Shadow of the Colossus: "When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is _all_ you can do. Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar." Rossignol hits up BLDGBLOG, and (as if you couldn't have guessed), it's good.

"Guru Meditation also reminds us of the long history of experimentation with physical controllers in the mainstream consumer videogame market, even when both that market and its critics would have us believe that physical interfaces are as new as DDR or Nintendo Wii." A game for Atari 2600 + Joyboard, and also available as an iPhone port; make the yogi fly by sitting perfectly still, and perfectly upright. Written in assembler, and everything.

"The problem is, it doesn’t have a smug website with fancy branding, so you probably overlooked it the first time. Go back and take another look." Worth knowing about, even if it's a long while since I've need continuous builds.

'London police are now deleting tourists' photos because "photographing anything to do with transport is strictly forbidden."' Oh god.

"Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots."

"[within the games industry]… the creativity-medium-invention and attitude-practice-deconstruction models often hold no water. Rather, there is only importance placed upon the “talent-meiter-immitation” model that is still in practice in the industry today." An interesting analysis of the nature of education (as it relates to the games industry) and models of learning. I have often lamented the depressing state of how career progression in the industry works, and this article helps quantifies it.

A thoughful post (as ever) from the L4D team detailing some of the balancing and planning that's gone into the Survival Mode experience. Looking forward to firing this up next week…

"The genre of the palindrome, playful and ludic as it is, nonetheless has a strong implication of violence. In the work of its foremost practitioners, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as some of their postmodern successors, the palindrome is closely linked to death, cannibalism, beheading, and murder."

Tom Francis posits an alternate ending to Bioshock, that makes sense of the Vita-Chambers switcheroo, gives the player the agency they've craved, fixes some of the issues with the original ending, and asks you kindly to DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO.

"The reason for [Singstar's relatively "low" Metacritic scores] is also the reason that this is an article about SingStar, and not a review of SingStar Queen and the new wireless microphones: SingStar is now basically unreviewable. Unlike Guitar Hero: Metallica, or AC/DC Live: Rock Band, SingStar has morphed from a game into a service, and defies traditional critical judgement."

"I think issues of power and governance are going to swiftly rise in importance on internet communities, as they expand to include more different kinds of people. It's interesting that some of the best, most resonant ideas on these topics that I've encountered over the years has come from political writers and may have been produced even before the internet." Mike has read lots of books, and his quotations/sources here are great.

A wonderful old postmortem – on Shadows of the Empire for the N64. As a launch title, there was lots of working with unfinished hardware, prototype controllers, and SGI workstations; it's long and detailed, and a fantastic portal to a world that seems eons ago, even if it was only 12 years away.

"In fact the propeller is really rotating. Russians fix a magnet on their helicopter blades. The device sends a signal to synchronize a movie camera, allowing to visualize efforts and deformations on the blades." Hypnotic, and unnerving.

"Looking in, it’s clear that the game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does. Maybe I could hoist one more flag in the indie games parade, but I think of myself as building a Micro-ISV in the web software business. It’s a much nicer community." As usual: anyone with a degree of sanity looking in from the outside comes to the same conclusions.

"Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it."

Mike Kuniavsky being really good, again, about avatars, physical mashups, and mashups as opportunistic design. Loads of great stuff inside the pdf.

"…yes, if I’d gotten a Lenovo when you all suggested it, I’d have a spill-proof keyboard with drains. That’s my plan for the next time something horrible happens to my laptop, which should be any day now." Randall Munroe's laptop died. I blame the package management, rather than the milk, personally.

"They took the trailer from "WestSide Story" and made it look like "28 days Later", hillarity ensues." No, that's bloody brilliant.

"I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance. Many are interesting and aesthetically pleasing in their own right, if you just give them some attention." Martin Parr on noticing the everyday.

"The problem is that what made GoldenEye so good was a fleeting, transient quality that can never be grasped again: it's not that the game was especially brilliant by modern standards, but rather that it utterly eclipsed its contemporaries. These days, the FPS is as comfortable on consoles as it is on Windows, and for a Bond shooter to have the same impact as GoldenEye it would have to outperform Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, BioShock, and Half-Life 2. In short, it would have to be revolutionary." Although: a big part of what made it so good was the social side of the jerky split-screen multiplayer, and Live just isn't the same. Yes, there was the context, but there was also some kind of magical glue holding it all together. Still, there are lots of smart, sensible points here, about emerging from the shadow of Goldeneye.

Clint Hocking's presentation materials – talk, slides, short mpeg – from his GDC09 lecture, "Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation". It's meaty and weighty and it's really, really, really good, and covers lots of bases and I'll need to read it again. Lots of dense stuff about the balances between Far Cry 2's gameplay systems, designing systems for improvisation, and rebalancing games to what they want to be. My mancrush is not abated, sadly.

Dave Sirlin offers some analysis of SF4. I think, at the overview level, he's got a good point: SF4 is not actually as "accessible" as everyone makes out; it's certainly got a lower on-ramp than SF3, but it ramps up pretty fast. More on this in a blogpost, I think.

"After being seen as cheap or low-rent housing for much of the 40s, asylums started to be seen as 21st century modern, and desirable places to live." All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. Heathcote's Lyddle End entry is fantastic, and primarily for his writing/futurism.

Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over

"I must admit that I would have loved to get this richness of backstory into the actual game itself, but the longer pipeline of game asset development and integration made that impossible." Clint Hocking explaining the background behind the fictional blog for Far Cry 2.

The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.

"A few weeks ago we released our shapefiles via the API, and while most people were excited, some folks were a bit confused about what it all meant. Which is why Tom Taylor’s beautiful Boundaries application is so exciting. It helps you visualize the Flickr community’s twisty changing complex understanding of place." Tom is on code.flickr.com! Hurrah!

"Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment." A brief history of pixelfonts.

"Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild." This is exactly the kind of thing I was banging on about at Gamecity. Presentation online soon!

"We're still going through the stats, but at the time of writing there were almost 170,000 messages on the Strictly [Come Dancing] board." Holy hell. Poor moderators. (And: for such an uninteresting story, as well!)

"If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse." Iroquois on co-op, and the way Left 4 Dead sees online co-op – and the bad behaviour of players online – as design problems to solve, rather than to ignore.

"Who designs a character for gamers to never go near? Who spends the time to create the most terrifying creature imaginable, and doesn’t impose it on players? Well, clearly Valve. The temptation to have her be aggravated from great distances, to force her to attack when encountered, must have been there. But then she’d have lost her power. Her power comes from just sitting there. It’s that benign, ragged, vulnerable form. It’s the combination of singing and crying. Oh God, the singing *and* crying." John Walker examines the horror of Left 4 Dead's Witch. A little over-written perhaps, but he totally nails the fear the character instills, and the way you always notice her a split-second too late.

Mitch just isn't inspired by user-generated content, no matter how charming a core game might be. The comments thread on this one is really good.

"The next generation on from them – e.g. Jonathan Smith, Doug Church and of course Greg Costikyan (from whose classic essay on developing such a critical language the title of this post is lifted) are always eloquent, passionate and insightful speakers and spokespeople for their medium. Unlike Molyneux." Not too annoyed I missed this, given Matt's comments.

"…the players are there for their character, not for your story. Your story is just the path for their characters, the medium through which they can play their persona. Once the GM realizes this, they should then realize that respecting the player and the character is paramount to their story. And it’s a surprisingly easy skill to master, because it really is as simple as recognizing what the players and characters want, what they came to do and then give it to them."