I swear, just go and read this right now; it might look like it's about games, but really, it's about space, and memory, and Memory Palaces, and wrapped around a retrospective of a marvellous game, and a little bit about how games make us who we are, in ways their creators might never have imagined.

"We already know the decapitated Statue of Liberty in Deus Ex can tell a story; perhaps I want to know if a building can tell me a poem.

In that vein, "Butte, Montana. 1973" is a game where you dig around in a box of dirt."

This is marvellous; thoughtful, interesting, perhaps not entirely successful, but the trick of the rain at the end is a very, very nice touch.

"At this moment of awards-giving and back-patting, however, we can all agree to love movies again, for a little while, because we're living within a mirage that exists for only about six or eight weeks around the end of each year. Right now, we can argue that any system that allows David Fincher to plumb the invention of Facebook and the Coen brothers to visit the old West, that lets us spend the holidays gorging on new work by Darren Aronofsky and David O. Russell, has got to mean that American filmmaking is in reasonably good health. But the truth is that we'll be back to summer—which seems to come sooner every year—in a heartbeat. And it's hard to hold out much hope when you hear the words that one studio executive, who could have been speaking for all her kin, is ready to chisel onto Hollywood's tombstone: "We don't tell stories anymore."" This is good, and sad.

"If you’re like us, your knowledge is spread across several places: Gmail, Google Docs, Basecamp, and more. Redwood makes it easy to search across these sources, right from your desktop." Clever.

"Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade, so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation, is mine." Steven Poole's list is good, though two entries for the MGS series is one too many, IMHO. I'd swap one of them for something Harmonix-flavoured.

"This is a list of old game releases. These games were priced at nearly $50 a year ago, now probably a lot less. Why buy a new game when there are plenty of fun games out there worth renting or buying for less?" Games released twelve months ago this week, by Andre Torrez. He's right, you know – games don't have to be about nowness all the time.

"It’s pretty difficult to talk about what you’ve got wrong. When you’ve been working on something like School of Everything very intensely for two years you can’t really blame the mistakes on anybody else. But the truth is that we need to rethink because we haven’t managed to make the idea financially sustainable yet." And so they're doing out loud. It's a big move; I hope it works out OK for them, because they're definitely Good People.

"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all."

"On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter." Some excellent stuff from Bryan Boyer.

"As a real-life pro skater, you might spend three hours out of every day practicing. Three hours trying new tricks, screwing up and the ground abruptly slipping out from under you. Imagine living your life in that fog of frustration, embarrassment, adrenaline and pride. Now let's imagine you got really sick, swallowed, like, nine Paracetamols and passed out in bed. THPS2 is what you'd dream." Quinns goes misty-eyed over THPS2, and he is right to do so. It was wonderful.

"It’s pretty common to want SQL queries against a particular table to always be sorted the same way, and is one of the reasons why I added the ordered scope to the utility scopes gem… Well now you can specify default ordering, and other scopes, in edge rails directly in your ActiveRecord model." Hurrah!

"With the recent addition of dynamic scopes, however, you now have a way to both quickly specify query logic and chain further conditions. The naming works in the same manner as dynamic finders and the chaining works in the same fashion as conventional named scopes." Ooh. New in Rails 2.3, and passed me by a little.

Really rather good series of tutorials on the FCE4 basics.

"So here's my theory: WoW doesn't resemble a film. It resembles, rather, a medieval cathedral. And a magnificent one: it is the Chartres of the video-game world. Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion; indeed, since WoW is in a state of permanent expansion, it may not ever be "complete". All those programmers are the modern-day equivalent of stonemasons, foundation-diggers and structural engineers."

"This December, the Eisner-winning artists behind such acclaimed projects as "Sugar Shock," "Umbrella Academy," and "BPRD: 1947" will present "Daytripper," their first original title from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint… The comic, which jumps around moments in the life of Brazilian aspiring novelist and newspaper obituary writer Brás de Oliva Domingos, will follow the main character as he explores and evaluates his own existence and attempts to discover the answer behind the mystery of the meaning of life itself." Oh. This sounds good!

"I missed this earlier in the year. In their issue 923, Domus magazine published this hidden illustration of ‘Miss Web 2.0’. Imagine planning it." I daren't. That's amazing.

Jolly good, that man; speaking sense and pointing out the hypocrisy of the media talking this all up. And: how is this different to the hoo-haa over expenses in any other year? No, I don't know, either.

"Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun." The Penguin thing is a bit over-done, but there's a care and attention to detail here that really sets them apart.

"…there’s no real hope for the Survivors. Each trip through a campaign is different, but it begins with them knee-deep in the undead, and ends with them escaping to an uncertain future. We never see the Survivors truly safe. Between chapters, they rest in Safe Rooms, but they can’t hide there forever. Most unsettlingly, there are signs that the Survivors themselves remember doing all this before." Francis, incidentally, hates Beckett.

"Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome." Jack gets interviewed by Jennifer over on the Kicker blog. And: "Always have nice pens".

Jason Rohrer has a new puzzle game out, designed primarily for iPhone but also available for OSX/Windows/Linux as ever. The UI is very thoughtful, for something finger-driven; the game mechanic is complex, but I think I'll get a handl eon it soon. I hope.

"As I watched the gunfire on screen, I should have been wondering what it was like to actually be in the shoes of those soldiers. But as I sat staring, I instead wondered whether the Marines had bothered to observe that building for civilian inhabitants before demolishing it. I wondered how any Marine that got shot in Iraq could endorse a game based on Fallujah where you can be hit by a hail of bullets and walk away. By the end, I was left wondering what Konami was thinking." A strong article from Nick Breckon on the problems already showing with Six Days In Fallujah. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, and not at all knee-jerk. I, too, am already concerned.

Lovely: Creature Comforts meets "Hey There Little Fella". Totally charming.

Ocean Quigley has a blog, and whilst all the stuff on Spore and Sim City 4 is super-nice, what I really like are his paintings and sketches, which are just lovely.

"Daily deep-dive analysis of a specimen from the modern world's most exciting communication medium for penis humor."

"That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy."

"Either way, I love reading these cables. The language is crafted so perfectly, despite the constraints. They’re caught between poetry and machinery." Yes. And what a different game it was then; lots to like in this taut post from Dan Hill.

"Welcome to House of Bendie – a UK clothing line that takes classic, British suiting fabrics and creates unsuit-like clothes for men and women. We specialise in bespoke hoodies: hand-made, made-to-measure, hooded jackets crafted from exquisite suit materials." Oh, lovely.

"Generated" certainly is the wrong word.

"Just remember, 'There’s only us.'" Some good analysis; fair and even-handed.

"Sometimes you want to follow someone on Twitter, but you don't want them to know you're following them. We present to you TweetStalk ‒ the simple way to stalk Twitter users without having to follow them." Oh for heavens' sake.

"A man can only eat so many cheap sniper shots, so many deaths by machine gun from over 75 meters away, so many attempts at a final tricky jump to a tiny ledge across a giant gap, so many degrading restarts… Sometimes I hate games so very much." Sadly, much of this is pretty true.