-
"this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short… the music is free as long as it's being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short. if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that's generated being given to the humane society." Moby is smart when it comes to licensing his music. I think this is a really good move, and not something you'd expect from a major recording artist.
-
"For one, there's an undercurrent of a siege mentality in journalism right now, with newsrooms cutting staff and print operations frozen stiff in the headlights of the internet. The focus on narrative and story gives a softer edge and an escape valve, though - this group is not primarily a tech-driven community, but they catch on to new developments quickly and bend them into the service of storytelling." Interesting round-up from Mike, particularly with respect to the NYT's election coverage.
-
“You know what a sign of love is, in this family? It’s if you come home and the elevator is on the ground floor,” says Linda. “Because that means whoever came home before you walked up twelve flights of stairs.” Fantastic article about Jay Maisel's house.
26
September
2008
September
2008
Links
Tagged as:
art, audio, conference, data, datadriven, development, film, freeware, housing, independent, interiors, jaymaisel, journalism, media, moby, music, nyc, photography, programming, realestate, soundtrack, video.
09
September
2008
September
2008
Links
Tagged as:
amazing, animation, bbc, cartoon, chuckjones, conference, container, copywriting, dansaffer, dconstruct08, deduction, design, documentation, education, experience, experiencedesign, games, inference, interaction, kicker, merb, method, products, programming, roadrunner, routing, ruby, rules, science, scientificmethod, selkbag, shipping, shippingcontainer, sleepingbag, statistics, studio, systems, teaching, thebox, wired.
-
"After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent — the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules. This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method."
-
Jason Kottke republishes the supposed rules that Chuck Jones and other Road Runner animators stuck to whilst making their cartoons. Perhaps a little apocraphyl, but I like the idea of rules for things that aren't games.
-
"Merb’s routing shiznits needs some serious documentation love. Whilst I have a shot at getting some proper docpatches together here’s an overview of how to use routing in Merb 0.5." Thank god for that - was finding Merb's docs a little patchy in places.
-
Cannot believe I only just discovered this: it's a sleeping bag with arms and legs. Incredible.
-
"…it’s my feeling that experiences can’t really be designed. You can only provide the resources for people to have an experience; then it’s the people (users) themselves who create the experience." Dan Saffer hits the nail on the head at his new studio's blog. Can't wait to see what comes out of Kicker.
-
"This leads into something else that felt very clear after the conference; the need to look outside of what we already know. If, as Matt Jones, posited, execution is more important than ideas, we’re going to need an understanding that is based on people who are not us, and that understanding is going to have to incorporate all the richness of what they know, how they model their worlds, and how they model their interactions with the world around them." Looking forward to more from Alex on dConstruct
-
"The Box is an ambitious and unique year-long project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world." Awesome. What's better is that it's a working container, which means it's not significantly contributing in a negative way to environmental damage any more than other containers. Could be interesting.
Back from Develop
So that was Develop.
To put it in a nutshell - or at least, what I remember that can be bounded by a nutshell:
strong ideas, building bands, Kirks and Picards, theatre, cultural studies, mise en scène, horror through constraint, good individuals versus great teams, cultural studies, importing the wrong ideas about movies, rather good chocolate cakes, putting many names to faces, impromptu One Life Left appearance, listening to children, being a good teacher, nuArgs, still needing to play Chain Factor, developers’ main hatred of Flash being its lack of IDE (and static typing), all games are alternate realities, feelies, importance of good user-testing, importance of realistic user-testing, input-behaviour-control, cybernetics as model for AI, de-emphasising behaviour in favour of farming out to concepts, fish and chips in a Hove park, sea air, 2K Boston’s virgin-hiring practices, Kotaku-headline meme, lists of fantasy movies, The Final Countdown on four-player Band Brothers DX, raspberry coffee.
As for my talk, it seemed to go pretty well and people were positive. I’ll try to get it up within the week. I’ve also got some notes from a few sessions I’d like to write up, because my web and design readers might enjoy them. Doing that might make sense of some of those notes.
Thanks to everybody who made it so memorable: it was a pleasure to meet you all.
29
June
2008
June
2008
games
Tagged as:
conference, games, nlgd, personal, play, socialsoftware, web20.
NLGD wrap-up
As mentioned earlier, I spoke at the NLGD Festival of Games conference in Utrecht a few weeks ago; it’s only now that I’ve got time to write it up.
I had a lot of fun: I got to meet a lot of smart people and as well as seeing some excellent presentations, on everything from interaction design to data visualisation, from storytelling to mobile play. I also got to participate in one of the best beer tracks I’ve seen in recent years, and met lots of lovely, smart, switched-on people and talk to (and at) them at length. I’ve got reams of notes to condense at some point, and lots of happy memories; in my books, that’s a success. Many thanks to the organisers, and to everybody who made me feel so welcome and who engaged me in chat.
I’d love to put the talk online, but you’ll have to wait a few more weeks; I’m going to be presenting a slightly tweaked version of the talk at the Develop conference in Brighton (as part of its Online track). Have no fear, though: once I’m done in Brighton, the slides and notes will all be online.
In the meantime, you might be interested in a brief interview I did with Gamasutra, which is now online, and which touches on some of the topics both of my own session and the rest of the conference.
08
June
2008
June
2008
games
Tagged as:
conference, games, me, nlgd, socialsoftware, speaking, talk, web20.
Upcoming Conference: NLGD
Some exciting news: I’m going to be talking at NLGD, the Dutch Festival of Games in Utrecht, in two weeks time.
I’m going to be talking about “What games can learn from social software”. There’s lots of interesting stuff going in social software and Web 2.0 as a whole that really isn’t permeating far enough into the games industry - yet - so this talk is designed as an overview of some of the more interesting (and not immediately obvious) aspects of social software, and how they might apply to games. I think it should be both fun and informative, and despite the usual pressures, I’m looking forward to writing it a lot.
The talk itself is spun out of my session at Gamecamp, which turned out to be incredibly successful - lots of great discussion and enthusiastic feedback.
And so I’m going to Utrecht. Looking forward to it, if only because it’s always exciting to attend a conference outside your core interests. I’ve spoken about games before, but never to the games industry, so that’ll be quite exciting: lots of new people to meet, lots of new perspectives to hear.
20
April
2008
April
2008
games
Tagged as:
conference, event, gamecamp, games, guardian, play, unconference, videogames.
Gamecamp
It’s been linked up all over the place, but I may as well link it again: the Guardian are running Gamecamp, a one-day unconference about games and play, on the third of May, and I’m going to be there, cooking up some nefarious quiz-shaped entertainment with some of the usual suspects such as Dan, James, Lee, and a few others.
Obviously, it being an unconference, everyone attending is encouraged to talk, and I’m working on thinking up a session - but about what, I have no idea. Or perhaps I have too many. I’m hoping to do something along the lines of tight criticism - something detailed and focused. And I’m not sure what sort of games to talk about yet. But I’ll work something out, and I’m looking forward to what the other participants will bring.
Like most events suffixed -camp, it’s going to sell out fast. Tickets are available from Monday April 21st. If you’re interested in coming, good luck getting one. It’ll be fun to see you - and if you’re interested, I’ll gladly corner someone for a game of Lost Cities…
15
June
2007
June
2007
design
Tagged as:
conference, notes, reboot, reboot9, technology.
Reboot 9: notes now online
My notes from Reboot 9 are now online. Forgot to mention this when I did it last week, so am now making up for lost time.
When I say “notes”, I mean my notes on other people’s talks (as opposed to the notes on my own talk, which have been much requested and which are still in the pipeline).
Anyhow, do check them out if you’re curious as to what went on. They’re vaguely useful if you weren’t there; most things in [square brackets] are me extemporising, rather than anything the speaker said.
05
March
2007
March
2007
design
Tagged as:
business, conference, development, fowalondon07, technology, web, web20.
Notes on the Future of Web Apps 2007
It’s been about two week since I went to FOWA2007 in London, and I’ve been meaning to write it up for a while. It was an… interesting experience, and I’ve been trying to find a way to frame why that is. Speeding on a train back from the provinces to London seemed a good way to concentrate my thoughts.
Last year’s FOWA was great: a one-day conference for
19
February
2007
February
2007
design
Tagged as:
conference, fowalondon07, me.
Future of Web Apps 2007
A straight-up announcement post here: I’m going to be at Future of Web Apps in Kensington for the next two days. I’m reasonably identifiable (redhead, sideburns, goatee) and I’ll probably have a neck-badge that says “Developer” on it.
I think it’ll be even better than last year’s, in part because it’s spread over two days, and there are more gaps for socialising. So if you don’t see me in the hall, grab me outside it. I won’t be around on the Tuesday night due to prior commitments (The Long Blondes at the Astoria, hurrah) but will definitely be up for much in-pub ranting on the Wednesday. So: do say hello if you’re going to be there, and maybe we can bat some ideas around.
15
October
2006
October
2006
design
Tagged as:
conference, dconstruct, feedback, web20.
Some belated thoughts on d.Construct 2006
d.Construct 2006 was well over a month ago, now, but I’ve simply been so busy since then that I just haven’t had a moment to write up my experiences.
d.construct is a “grass-roots” web conference in Brighton, run by the nice chaps from Clearleft. It only lasts a day, and, at £75+VAT, it’s insanely good value. I don’t want that last fact to go unnoticed. It was also a great lineup of speakers, including Thomas Vanderwal, Jeremy Keith, Simon Willison, Paul Hammond, Jeff Barr, and Jeff Veen. £88 just to hear all of them speak is, any way you look at it, a very good deal. And then, of course, there’s the all the networking and the chat and the the pub, with four-hundred web-types who descended on Brighton, which is often the highlight of any conference.
When I filled in my feedback form, I realised I didn’t have time to write what I really wanted to say. So I put down the improvements that were the easiest to fix (and, it seems, the most universally agreed upon): more legroom, more power sockets.
Beyond that, what I had to say wasn’t so appropriate for a feedback form, as I’m not quite show how to improve upon my criticisms. But I still think it’s worth putting them down in writing.
At the heart of d.construct is a very good event. I enjoyed this year’s event a lot. But I think there are some areas that could perhaps be improved - or at least addressed - in future years.
First of all, the format. d.construct is much like the Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps events - it’s a series of speakers talking, one at a time, one after another, in a big auditorium. It’s not stranded or streamed. At the same time… it’s a bit intimidating in that people tend not to want to break out of it. The moment you introduce two or more strands, attendees begin to realise that perhaps they don’t want to go to either talk, and so they decamp to the back room to mingle and chat. And d.construct had a great “back room”, with power, refreshments, and tons of space. As it was… everyone piled into the hall for every session, regardless of whether or not it interested them. Quite often, I saw a number of people ignoring the talk to concentrate on their iPhoto session, and then dumping their latest pictures onto Flickr. I’m sure they could have done that “out back”, or, more likely, found people to talk about things they were interested in. I cut Aral Balkan’s Flash talk - because, whilst I’m a client-side developer, I have zero interest in Flash - and was disappointed to only find about six people hanging around out back, and one or two in the pub around the corner. The chat I had during the session I skipped was great.
I also found the angle a little curious. d.construct, whilst pitching itself as a “web application and Web 2.0 conference”, is very much a web conference coming from the front end. I was disappointed when Jeremy came over very apologetic that he was even showing code at all during his presentation - and it wasn’t really very complex at all. In the end, no matter how many wireframes and PSDs are drawn, websites only exist in code, and I get frustrated when people have to shy away from that kind of expression.
Similarly, I was a bit frustrated that he managed to talk about REST without mentioning HTTP verbs (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE), as they’re as important to the RESTian concept as the URL structure. But I can understand - given what appeared to be the conference’s target audience - why this was the case. It also meant that Jeff Barr got a slightly raw deal - he was going first, and he was easily the most “corporate” of the speakers, but I thought his talk was a great balance of explaining some of the awesome work Amazon are currently doing, and demonstrating how real users have made use of it. But, if you don’t get the importance of S3 or especially EC2 (which is, in some ways, revolutionary), it just sounds like corporate buzzwordiness.
And I was also frustrated by this because the more general-purpose or front-end talks - Thomas Vanderwal’s IA session on tagging (a pretty complete history and explanation of tagging) and Jeff Veen’s phenomenal closing session - were both reasonably high-level (in terms of what they’re discussing) and well received. And for good reason - Veen was absolute dynamite.
Maybe it’s because Clearleft themselves are, primarily, a front-end consultancy, but I don’t want to trivialise things that far or make such bold assumptions. It might just be that it’s the best common ground over which to bring people in the UK together. But I think there’s interesting things about development to be expressed to general audiences, especially given that buzzword-of-the-moment AJAX is all about the point where the front- and back-ends join. And I’m concerned that whilst Web 2.0 (however you understand that phrase) advocates a more holistic, interconnected web, the design and build process is becoming ever-less holistic.
But I don’t want to be a complete downer. Like I said, it was a great-value conference, at which I met many interesting people, and the speakers were all excellent. Maybe next year it will move to multiple tracks; maybe it’ll broaden its scope. Either way, I’m still going to go; it’s a great mixer of an event, and it’s nice to go to something that’s not in London for once. My congratulations to Richard, Andy, and Jeremy on its success; I hope my comments aren’t taken too hard nor too negatively. And I hope you can see why I didn’t quite have time or space to condense them on the feedback form.
Update: One thing I forgot to mention, that’s surely worth a big plus point, is that the “female quota” at this conference was very high. I’m sure that sounds awfully patronising, but given the amount of coverage of “why women won’t go to conferences” (see Mike Kuniavsky on this), it was interesting to note a percentage well into the double figures - I’d say about 20%+, at least. Whether this is because of the front-end focus - or, rather, the less-threatening, less-technical focus - I don’t know, and again, don’t want to trivialise. But bonus marks for this, for sure.)
Links & notes for this month
- "If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.
- "Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions." Beautiful, notably "I wish I were the Moon"
- "In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"-- the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts." Fantastic piece from Steve Gaynor, which touches on some notions of the death of the designer - namely, that the designer *is* inherently present in games; they embody themselves in mechanics, and games that downplay logical mechanics that players can reverse-engineer do themselves a disservice.
- I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive... but "Height" is really lovely.
- This might come in handy sometime.
- "Restore harmony by clicking the tiles until no open end is left over."
- Excellent interview with Yoshi Ono on some of the design challenges and nuanaces of Street FIghter IV. The stuff about when to skip frames (and when not to) is particularly interesting.
- "Maybe it's the tusks, and the horns. Running with a dangerous crowd. You have to admit, dark elf boys are kind of wuss. And let's not even talk about gnomes. Or maybe it's part of the separation process. Getting away from your parents. For sure I can't ever visit her in the Undercity."
- "Marketing is a strategic function about delivering customers what they want. It isn’t a jazz hands and rubber chicken and t-shirts. It is the heart of successful companies..."
- A few notes on Flickr's queueing systems.
- Cultured Code do a large behind-the-scenes look at how they designed their Things iPhone UI. Lots of detail, lots of working shown. Even if you don't agree with the choices they made, it's excellent to see somebody sharing at this level of detail.
- "Still, it’s 110 days (or 2,663.18 hours) that I’m sort of responsible for taking from a girl’s life. Phileas Fog circumnavigated the globe in less time than that." A lovely piece of writing from Simon Parkin, tracking down a digital life he sold long ago.
- "...one final achievement, ‘Remember September ‘44′ rewards players with no less than 50 achievement points for simply playing the game at some point on September 17th, the anniversay of the events depictied in the game. As you have to be connected to Xbox Live at the time, there’s no way to cheat by fixing the time on your console’s clock, meaning that gamers who want the full 1000 points on offer will have to hang on to the game for close to a year from now..."
- "Turn photos of your designs into real life things." Fabbing based upon photographs or illustration. Blimey.
- "The rumblings you've been hearing in the criminal underground since July indeed are true: At long last, we are seeking new applicants to the League." Eeeeexcellent.
- "The Wireframe Graph Paper Notepad is made for visual designers, interaction designers, and information architects... These pages are great for sketching, but also work well when producing high fidelity drawings. The grid consists of 24 columns with gutters, so you can easily divide your canvas into common divisions..." Oh, yes please.
- "this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short... the music is free as long as it's being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short. if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that's generated being given to the humane society." Moby is smart when it comes to licensing his music. I think this is a really good move, and not something you'd expect from a major recording artist.
- "For one, there's an undercurrent of a siege mentality in journalism right now, with newsrooms cutting staff and print operations frozen stiff in the headlights of the internet. The focus on narrative and story gives a softer edge and an escape valve, though - this group is not primarily a tech-driven community, but they catch on to new developments quickly and bend them into the service of storytelling." Interesting round-up from Mike, particularly with respect to the NYT's election coverage.
- “You know what a sign of love is, in this family? It’s if you come home and the elevator is on the ground floor,” says Linda. “Because that means whoever came home before you walked up twelve flights of stairs.” Fantastic article about Jay Maisel's house.
- "When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.
- "Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.
- Make Iced Tea!
- "Now noisy makers can assemble and modify their own light controlled analog noise friend!" I want an analog noise friend.
- "Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level -- one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.
- "People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it... you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?
- Wonderful.
- "There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people... Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."
- "Recently I had been wondering what the complete list of HTTP status code symbols was in Rails. Searching through Rails didn't yield any results for a symbol like :unprocessable_entity... Rails defines the symbol to status code mapping dynamically from the status message. The symbol used is an underscored version of the status message with no spaces." Quick list of clear textual shorthand for returning HTTP status.
- "Let’s no longer think in terms of selling them a game. Let’s instead think of selling them an experience." A nice article on the changing shape of game design, particularly when it comes to narrative and participatory hooks.
- "Every year on or around the same day ... at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser's death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist." Tom Phillips project, as mentioned in Reading the Everyday.
- "Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X, built around the powerful DOSBox. Boxer aims to make it easy and painless to play your DOS games."
- "Microsoft may very well not be broken. The world needs reliable bureaucracies that mollify the needs of corporations and individuals in the center of the market. But if it is broken, advertising isn't going to fix it."
- "Some people believe that there's no correlation between quality and sales, and thus think that the way to make money is to make things that are easily marketable (read: licenses). Game developers themselves usually argue that sales above a certain level require a game to be sufficient quality. I decided to see which of these perspectives was correct for the Playstation 2 era." Datanalysismachinego!
- "Of course, to get the most points, your band needs a bassist. And nobody wants to play bass. So if you want to lead a full band, you're going to have to play bass yourself. And this is like life!" Lovely article from Torpex' Jamie Fristrom.
- "After replacing the old plist, you can use your Hori stick with MacMAME!" Fantastic. Six-button fighter action agogo.
- "A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items." Oh god no. Don't cross the time-sink streams!
- "And if there was a "prize" in this lottery, it was not so much the object itself, but the letter and the awesome mysteries of unfathomable spiritual connections, and the very gesture itself from this dear, dear person and the timing!" What a story.