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"After some delay I am now proud to announce that the complete Permanent Death saga is available for download. This definitive PDF version of the story, novel, machinima, whatever you want to call it, is something I am immensely proud of. I feel it eclipses both the scope and quality of anything I’ve ever produced before." It was a lovely endeavour, and still one of my favourite games – certainly of the decade, and perhaps ever.
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"AquaPath is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you to evaluate XPath 2.0 expressions against any XML document and view the result sequence in a dynamic, intuitive tree representation." It is really good, and has already saved my bacon today.
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Spotify playlists of videogame soundtracks, and links to soundtrack albums as well.
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Photoshoot for Empire; actors pose in pastiches of scenes for which they are famous. But with the emphasis on looking hot. Some are weak, but Christian Bale and his fireaxe, and Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins, are great.
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"Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software." Oooh.
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"Perhaps the Shoreditch startups are more effective than their Dutch counterparts not just because they do more with less… but because they are in London. A city at a different scale than Amsterdam or for that matter the greater Amsterdam area, the Randstad as we call it around these parts. A city with a more diverse ecosystem of services and things, smaller services, more specialised services, ready to be employed by companies like BERG and RIG and Tinker, enhancing their abilities when needed."
05
December
2009
December
2009
Links
Tagged as:
benabraham, berg, cartography, cities, culture, data, development, empire, farcry2, fashion, free, games, gis, karsalfrink, london, maps, movies, music, osx, photography, software, soundtracks, spotify, startups, stills, tool, vector, visualisation, writing, xml, xpath.
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"Ultimately, when I reject narrative techniques in favor of ludic ones, what I am really saying is that I reject traditional authorship. I reject the notion that what I think you will find emotionally engaging and compelling – and then build and deliver to you to consume – is innately superior to what you think is emotionally compelling. By extension, I reject the idea that I can make you feel the loss of a friend in a more compelling way by authoring an irreversible system than you could make yourself feel by playing with a system wherein a friend can be both dead and alive simultaneously and wherein his very existence can be in flux based on your playful whim… This discussion is not about how to make a game more meaningful. It is about how games mean." Yep, I still want to marry Clint Hocking.
01
April
2009
April
2009
Links
Tagged as:
balance, clinthocking, design, farcry2, gameplay, games, gdc, gdc09, impro, improvisation, presentation, systems, talk.
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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.
26
March
2009
March
2009
Links
Tagged as:
art, bodyart, books, clinthocking, design, development, farcry2, games, gdc09, idsoftware, iphone, johncarmack, literature, play, poetry, programming, quotations, tattoo, tattoos, wolfenstein, writing.
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"Mastery is not a prerequisite to improvisational play. The only prerequisite is confidence, and the only prerequisite in making the game is that we do not discourage the player from improvisation by "humiliating" the player." This talk really does sound like it confirms what I already know: Hocking is bang on a lot of money, very self-aware, and I want to give him consensual manhugs. Also, I want him to make more games. Lots more games. Curses at not getting to GDC.
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John Carmack writes about porting Wolfenstein 3D to the iPhone – there's a lot in here that's very interesting, and some smart notes on design and interface choices; there's also some Carmack Being Carmack. Still, he's an impressive developer, and it's nie to see someone being so open at development, especially for the iPhone
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"Tattoos from books, poetry, music, and other sources." As with all tattoos: some are misspelt, some are a bit blah, some are beautiful.
04
February
2009
February
2009
Links
Tagged as:
actionscript, art, astronomy, bjp, blog, choice, code, coercion, comics, communication, crm, farcry2, flash, freedom, funny, game, games, information, iroquoispliskin, kentacho, management, online, photography, programming, safety, scraping, shmup, space, transport, transportchaos, travel, uk, useful, via:offworld, web, webcomic.
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Pup ponders the heat-death of the universe. Beautiful, and a lovely use of space, too.
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"CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes including communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areas entails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources – equipment, procedures and people – to promote safety and enhance the efficiency of flight operations."
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Scrapes lots of things, produces a useful page which actually manages to stay up. Also, it spells TRANSPORT CHAOS the only way it should be spelt: in capitals.
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Named for the year the BJP was founded; nicely written, and not just a fast-moving press release stream.
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All Kenta Cho's code on wonderfl.
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Kenta Cho's making stuff on wondfl, in ActionScript. This example is ASCII-based bulletty goodness.
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"So perverse as it might sound, I'm going to plead for less choice in video games. It's a paradox: by limiting the player's discretion, you can expand the narrative possibilities of the medium. Coercion can create a kind of emotional heft that you can't achieve within the confines of the empowerment-myth." All true, and FC2 is a fantastic example of this. But: this is just one way of making games. More of this, yes, but don't forget all the other approaches.
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"write Actionscript3 code in a textarea, and your code will be compiled server side. Your compiled Flash will be reloaded automatically in the right side of the page, so write code and see it real-time." And you can fork other people's code. It's like github and Heroku all at once, but for Flash.
10
January
2009
January
2009
Links
Tagged as:
barackobama, comparison, ds, ebook, ereader, farcry2, games, gaza, gdc2009, homebrew, infographics, information, jamesbridle, list, maps, nintendo, nintendods, obama, patrickredding, quiz, readability, reading, talk, trivia.
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"Obama Says: Yes We Can is a Simon Says game based on Barack Obama's New Hampshire Primary speech, as later turned into song by will.i.am. Watch the game create a pattern of button and direction presses, and repeat that pattern correctly to score! The more you get correct, the harder the patterns become – can you keep up?" Oh blimey.
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Lots of good stuff in here I didn't know about, all for your DS, and all not illegal. Hurrah for homebrew.
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"With DS Reader you can read any e-book (or text file) on your DS. It even has a great little bookmarking function to keep track of your progress." Ooh.
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"Game Trivia Catechism is a multiple-choice trivia game, testing your knowledge of video gaming. It can be played as straight trivia, or as part of a story that follows Al and Sally as they compete in the King of Game Trivia Tournament." Looks awesome.
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"Current mass-market games present simulations of incredible fidelity. Many of these titles also push genre boundaries and offer new mechanics to players. The problem, argues Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding (FAR CRY 2), is that these two developments are disconnected. Game output appears information-rich, but how much of that information can the player actually use to play better, and how much of it is just there to be spectacular or cinematic?" I would pretty much kill to see this. Gah.
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For those of you who might not be aware of its size, James has put the size of Gaza in context through comparing it to maps of other cities. Simple, effective communication.
06
January
2009
January
2009
-
"in the meantime, I decided to do an absolutely crucial bit of game science. Something that I am entirely sure is mulled over constantly, but never properly investigated. The question is but stated thusly: how long would it take the Little Prince to roll up an entire room based on a random path algorithm?" Julian is having fun.
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"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"
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"For all the talk of immersion and realism it seems gamers still want games that provide for them, that make them the centre of the action, the pivotal agent in the events of the world, the nexus around which everything is focused." And this is one of the big conflicts within games: you have to make the player feel wanted whilst they're playing the game, make them feel the centre of attention, because without them the game is nothing. But at the same time: can you still tell stories that aren't about them? I expand a little in the comment on the blogpost proper.
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"Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations… Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable." Could be useful.
24
December
2008
December
2008
games
Tagged as:
2008, braid, endofyear, farcry2, games, geometrywars2, godofwar, gravitation, grid, gtaiv, jasonrohrer, left4dead, lists, trism, worldofgoo.
Favourite Games of 2008
It’s the end of the year, and that means time for lists. My books and albums lists are forthcoming – hopefully tonight or tomorrow – but in the meantime, I thought I’d kick off with ten of my favourite games of the past year.
There’s lots missing here, mainly owing to the fact I haven’t finished a lot of recent titles or given them the time they’ve deserved. What this is, though, is a good summary of what the gaming year felt like to me; ten games I enjoyed a great deal, and that I would recommend in a heartbeat to anyone not sure where to begin with 2008.
And so, in no particular order:
Far Cry 2
(Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
I have written enough about this already, but suffice to say: it sunk its teeth into me, after the initial hump I couldn’t play anything else, and at the end, it left me unable to play anything else for a while. Spectacularly beautiful, too.
Trism
(iPhone)
Trism began as an app for the jailbroken iPhone; it quickly made the transition to the official App Store platform when that opened up, and it has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of copies since then, giving Demiforce a fantastic start to their company. And with good reason: it’s a great piece of game design, easy to learn, and hard to master. It also makes brilliant use of not only the iPhone’s capacitive touch screen, but also its tilt sensor. It’s a very pure puzzling experience, and I’ve already sunk many hours into it; it suits the pick-up/put-down rhythm of travel and play on-the-move idaelly. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, this really is a no-brainer.
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2
(Xbox 360)
It’s still one of the best games on Live Arcade. It’s also still one of the best asynchronous multiplayer games you can play. Making your friends high scores the default high score table gives it a great competitive streak and really contextualises your performance: nothing’s more frustrating than having emailed a friend to say “hah, beat your high score” only to receive an response five minutes later informing you that the ball is firmly back in your court.
Adding variety to the original formula are the six game modes, slowly unlocked over time. They may all be variants on a theme, but they all still demand unique skills and become games in their own right: turning the Pacifism achievement from the first game into a mode in its own right was a great move.
Beautiful in high-def, easily explained to anyone who’s played a videogame in their life, it’s by turns accessible and challenging, and an essential purchase for new 360 players. Also, its social scoreboards give it great longevity, and prove what I already know: I’m nearly, but not quite, at the bottom of the pack when it comes to motor control. As long as I’m not last…
Braid
(Xbox 360)
If there’s a measures of Braid’s success, it’s not to be found in its sales or metacritic scores, but in the sheer volume of verbiage devoted to it in the blogs, forums, and magazines of the gaming world. Thousands of words, all expended on the game, on the hype, and on what the hell it all means.
It wouldn’t have got that discussion if it wasn’t in some way good, and it really is: beautiful, challenging, and proof of the things that only games can do. It embraces game-native storytelling, wrapping its meaning tightly around its mechanics, and tells its tale through challenging, timeless puzzles and David Hellman’s incredible artwork.
Perhaps it is a little pretentious; perhaps the writing is weak. Regardless of those facts, it’s exciting to see a game like this getting such a major launch on a mainstream, living-room platform, and as an artefact to push forward the casual – as well as professional – criticism of games, it’s a great starting point.
GRID
(Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
I always forget how much I like racing games. GRID is a very, very fine take on the racer. It’s beautiful, it’s fast, and it’s totally stripped down. GRID demonstrated that Codemasters really understood what making a game “cinematic” might look like: you condense it down into tight, exciting drama. So races take place over two-to-five laps, and in that time the AI will give you as good a catfight as any “realistic” simulator might over an hour. The rewind-time mechanic, as well as being wonderful to watch, removes the traditional racing-game reliance on the “restart” option; giving the game a pre-credits race, not to mention an ongoing narrative of running a team only helps with the Days of Thunder feel. Mapping Le Mans to a twenty-four minute endurance race makes it both exciting and endurable.
And, of course, it’s very pretty and fast as hell. The open-wheel racing is some of the most exciting driving games have to offer, in particular. The drift tournaments are weak, but stick to the touring cars, touge and open-wheel and you’ve got a hell of a game. The icing on the cake is the beautiful, free-floating typography. Solid, and surprisingly good.
Grand Theft Auto IV
(Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
It’s on everybody else’s list, and I can’t really deny it: it’s a wonderful environment, and a staggering achievement. It’s not as smart as it likes, and it occasionally misfires but it delivers moments by the dozen. Shame the pacing of the islands feels wrong – after the majesty of Three Leaf Clover, being dumped in the New Jersey analogue is a bit underwhelming.
Also: multiplayer, with the right gang of people, is a total hoot. Whilst not the runaway online success that might have been hoped for, if you can get eight to sixteen friends online together, Cops and Crooks or Turf War will bring the fun pretty fast.
God of War: Chains of Olympus
(PSP)
Well, it came out this year in the UK. I played this sitting by a roaring log fire, having spent my days clambering around the Lake District. It is not the greatest game of the year by a long stretch. It is, however, a wonderfully crafted experience: short it may be, but it’s put together almost perfectly: fantastic environments that barely repeat, thrilling combat that’s not too difficult, and one of the most striking in-game sequences I’ve played this year. It helps that the lack of direct camera control translates perfectly to the single-stick PSP. On top of all that, it looks almost as good as the PS2 versions – it’s a remarkable feat of engineering. I had a lot of fun with this, and if you own Sony’s much-unloved portable, you owe yourself to play this.
Left 4 Dead
(Xbox 360, PC)
Gerard Way asked if it was any good, and the answer is yes, Gerard, it is. It’s bloody brilliant, although with the obvious caveat that it gets better with friends. Co-op gaming has slowly seen a slew of support and innovation in the past two to three years, and Left 4 Dead represents one particular pinnacle of that: an experience designed ground-up to be played not only co-operatively, but with real friends.
It’s not about team-mates, it’s about mates; how far would you go to save your friends from a Smoker? Quite far, as it turns out; I’ve noticed that in various pick-up groups, if I have to pick between someone I know in real life and someone I don’t, I’ll go with my friends first. To see such an unashamedly co-op experience – and one that could be described as reasonably hardcore if you hadn’t tried it – achieve such a level of mainstream success is very heartening. I put it down to the fact that Valve are such a talented gang of people, and so fastidious in their process. If you’ve not played through the director’s commentary, you owe it to yourself to do so, if only to understand that nothing in the final product is the result of chance.
Also: it’s great to see a game that puts the mechanic, indeed, the core technology, that really makes it – the AI – so far front-and-center. Personifying it as the AI Director was the stroke of genius that not only made players aware of it, but gave them someone to blame when they all died. Again.
World of Goo
(Mac, PC, Wii)
There are two reasons, I think, that World of Goo has captured a lot of people’s hearts this year. One is the game itself: the wonderful art; the delightful soundtrack; the just-one-more-go gameplay that carefully teaches you everything to know whilst keeping the challenge just high enough. But the other is the game’s mythology: 2D Boy, two guys working out of coffee shops for a year, giving up on the traditional industry to make the game they really wanted to. It’s the story we all wanted to believe in. The fact that both elements are so great is the real magic of World of Goo: risking it all, living the indie dream, really did lead to a wonderful game.
Gravitation
(Mac, PC, Linux)
I like this more than Rohrer’s previous Passage. It’s a small, simple game, available for most home desktop platforms (Windows/OSX/Linux), about “mania, melancholia, and the creative process”. To say any more is to rob it of its impact. Once I worked out what you have to do to progress, I played on with a huge lump in my throat. To be heartbroken by a game this slight, this simple, in its 100 square pixel area, is quite something, and Rohrer makes games like no-one else.
22
December
2008
December
2008
games
Tagged as:
clinthocking, farcry2, games, literature, narrative, patrickredding, plot, story, writing.
Africa Wins Again: Far Cry 2’s literary approach to narrative
Far Cry 2 is a difficult game to write about; difficult because it’s an experience that doesn’t coalesce in individual moments or fragments. Whilst there are many memorable moments I can point to – the dynamic, emergent gunfights that characterise the gameplay, the starkness of the major plot beats – it is the player’s overall experience of the game that is its greatest strength.
And isn’t that how things should be? For a game that revels in the open world that it’s set in – a fictitious African country that covers desert and mountain, swamps and savannah – it only seems appropriate that it be a game about the impact of a world on a character, rather than that character’s interactions with the world. Far Cry 2 takes the mechanics of its open-world shooting experience, and works out how to wrap them into a much larger narrative without losing the coherence of the player’s actions.
Far Cry’s references to Conrad (and, in particular, Heart of Darkness) are well-documented already, but I think to focus on the words used, the plot the game follows and the references within the game so explicitly isn’t necessarily useful. What struck me was not the game’s similarity to Conrad; it its much broader, deeper appropriation of literary techniques – whilst using them in an inherently gamelike manner – as a way to tell stories.
(Before we go on: there are likely to be what you might call “spoilers” ahead, so there’s a break in the text for those of you viewing on the web. I don’t see how we can talk meaningfully about this game without talking about specifics, so if you’ve not finished it and really care about this kind of thing, look away now.) Continue reading this post…
23
November
2008
November
2008
games
Tagged as:
farcry2, firstperson, games, immersion, narrative.
Paul Ferenc’s pistol
Paul Ferenc died today.
I met Paul in some ex-pat bar by a lagoon. He had work, and I needed a friend – or the closest I could get to a friend in this country. He used to be in the IDF; now, like the rest of us, he was a gun for hire in this mess of a country, his hair bleached by the African sun. We worked together on quite a few jobs. But our relationship was mainly characterised by absence; I’d not see him for days at a time, only occasionally bumping into him at safe houses when he had work. Always doing push-ups; I never understood how he didn’t go mad in there on his own.
I think we all might be mad already.
He saved my life countless times; dragging me to safety, covering me with gunfire whilst I reset dislocated bones, yanked slugs out of my arm with my multi-tool. And I returned the favour; often, I’d see the blue cloud rising from the smoke grenades he carried with him for emergencies, and run to his aid.
He was a tough guy. Nothing a syrette or two of morphine couldn’t sort out; always back on his feet in no time.
Today, I was off to destroy some compressors in a scrapyard; Paul reckoned we could cause more havoc if I got him a timetable for fuel convoys to the junkyard. It seemed like a reasonable deal. Most of his schemes weren’t too bad, but I baulked at the time he seemed to be financing retiring to Thailand through my sweat.
I got him the timetable, even if it did involve destroying half of a fuel depot out north. He suggested I meet him after I’d made a mess of the junkyard.
With the compressor gone, I headed northwards, ducking the machine-gun fire sputtering through the jungle. Through my scope, I saw Paul, shotgun blazing. Clearly, the convoy was well guarded. I lost sight of him, distracted by two mercs with RPKs; by the time my private gunfight was over, I couldn’t see Paul.
Then I saw the blue smoke.
I darted over to him. He looked in a bad way – he always looked in a bad way, to be honest – and I had morphine to spare. I gave him a shot, waited for the glint in his eyes to return and for him to spring up. Nothing. He asked for another, and I yanked the cap off with my teeth, drove it into the vein in his neck. Nothing. His eyes began to roll, vacantly.
It looked bad this time. I could probably spare him another syrette, but I was going to have to keep some for myself. The grip of his pistol jutted out of his jacket, and I began to thing about alternatives to just leaving him here.
One more shot, straight into the neck. His eyes rolled back for the last time, and he was still. No need for the pistol; no need for any more morphine. I closed his eyes.
There was nothing much else I could do. Life ends out here bloody and quickly, and I had to get back to the town. He’d been a good buddy, if not exactly a friend. I dropped my Russian-made pistol and took his large Desert Eagle from his waistband. Something to remember him by.
The gun was corroded, practically mud-brown; no wonder he’d gone down in the firefight at the convoy. But it was all that was left of Paul, now; I squashed it into my holster and drove towards Pala.
On the way there, a small group of mercs opened fire on me. Leaping from my jeep, I opened fire with the .50 pistol. Three shots and the rusty gun jams. I duck behind the hood, slapping the gun with my other hand, racking the slide to clear the jammed cartridge. No-one would come for me if I went down; my only backup was lying dead in the jungle, full of lead and morphine. All he left me was this gun, and it was likely to get myself killed.
The stuck cartridge cleared, and I opened fire again.
I arrived at Pala a while later. Paul Ferenc’s pistol lay in the dust at the cockfights, its slide half-locked with rust, its last victims a few feet away.
I went looking for new work, a new friend, and a new gun.
I’ll be writing something more substantial about Far Cry 2 in the near future. It’s a world that’s immersed me far more than I’d imagined it ever could, and documenting this morning’s events seemed like a good way of starting to move towards talking about it.
Links & notes for this month
- Lovely, interesting article about The Last Express; some nice notes about the production process, the problem with setting games at the turn of the century, and juggling as bonding. Interesting how many lessons from the game still have relevance to modern gaming, and I love the "small space, mapped perfectly" ideal.
- "The problem with remakes and ports for the critic, especially those of old beloved games, is emotional baggage. It's difficult to give a cold, measured critique of something you've loved since childhood. How can you give an objective appraisal when every time you hear the game's start-up melody your mind soaks happy in memories of warm endless school holidays, and that delicious, pure, all-encompassing escapism unique to children who play videogames? This game's story is also a part of my story, so it's impossible to get much distance between the two." A lovely paragraph in Simon's review of the DS Chrono Trigger re-release.
- "Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play. There are no right or wrong answers; there are many ways to solve every puzzle." Sounds gorgeous; looks beautiful. So much loveliness.
- Oh my. And I thought Astley didn't really like all the publicity from this. Clearly he's had a change of heart.
- "The Fuzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into designing and creating their own video games and demos. A full-featured core runs in the background and does all the video and audio processing so that your code stays clean and easy to understand." Ooh, that could be interesting.
- "Economics has been defined as the science of distributing limited means among unlimited and competing ends. On 12th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organization and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." Remarkable article; fascinating for its subject matter, when it was written, what it describes, and the patterns that hold up inside such a regimented economy. A must-read, really - can't believe it took me so long to get around to it.
- "Our attempts to bridle the player's freedom of movement and force our meaning onto him are fruitless. Rather, it is a distinct transportative, transformative quality-- the ability of the player to build his own personal meaning through immersion in the interactive fields of potential we provide-- that is our unique strength, begging to be fully realized." Some great Steve Gaynor; reminds me of Mitch Resnick's "microworld construction kits" all over again.
- "It's an easy, irresistible, almost childish pleasure: the ground meat dissolved into a dark blood-red sauce until they are one and the same; no hacking, slicing or cutting needed; a slurpy goodness; the oily bolognese hanging on to the slippery pasta; guaranteed joy in a world that's just ruled it out." Recipes for ragu.
- "Suddenly, instead of Pong, Nolan Bushnell unleashes a stark, monochrome rescue challenge on the world. AVOID MISSING PRINCESS FOR HIGH SCORE burns itself into the brains of a generation. A couple of sequels expand the world of this strange new hero and, keen to bring its popularity to bear on the 2600, Atari execs strong-arm Warren Robinett into populating Adventure with mushroom monsters and making the green dragon friendly." Delightful alterna-history from Margaret in her Offworld column.
- "Soon enough, amid the daily grind of his obsession, he would see in the game itself a way out of the bleak hole he had fallen into. He would take a clear-eyed, calculating look at what he and his fellow players had been doing all those months—at the countless hours they'd given over to the pursuit of purely virtual but implacably scarce commodities—and he would recognize it not just for the underexploited form of productivity it was but for the highly profitable commercial enterprise it might sustain." Fantastic article from Julian Dibbell on IGE, the massive real-money trading operation.
- "We will both have to take responsibility for our consumption. A product that keeps working for longer uses less-resources in the end. The key ingredient to all this is quality. To make something well, you know, the best you can do. To go the extra mile that it takes to do that. Every stitch, every zip, every little feature considered. The weakest points made strong. Then, and only then, have we made something that will last the test of time. Guaranteed for a minimum 10 years. Each product will come with a hand me down contract. You will sign who you want to leave the product to. This is legally binding."
- "Trust begins when I can see the design intention of an application." Great stuff from Rands on how sync should work - namely, in the dumbest way possible - and what building trust into application design looks like.
- "Throughout most of the year, gaming is distraction and entertainment. November separates the proverbial patriarchs from their upstart offspring. In November, the Gamer! and the With Job! blur. I spend my ill-defined work hours thinking, talking and writing about games. And the time I'm playing games become a form of work - a struggle to keep up no less frenetic than that of the clock-manager in Metropolis." This year's November release schedule was crazier than most, too.
- "the brains behind the siduhe bridge decided to ignore all those options and break another record instead. they attached the 3200ft cables to rockets and accurately fired them over the valley, becoming the first people to do so." Woah. The photographs are awesome.
- "...the brief, in a nutshell, was to take a series of actual whisky barrels and find a way to express the vast lengths of time it takes to actually produce a bottle of Glenfiddich Single Malt." I found the results rather lovely.
- "To state that another way, given a function f and input x, determine if f(x) will halt." AlanT puts out a tender on GetACoder for Turing's Halting Problem. The responses are entertaining.
- "Sweet! Quick time events? Combos? Finishing moves? It’s like they distilled Watchmen to it’s very essence. Wonderful."
- All of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. Made interactive. On Youtube. Horrible, barely "erotic", choose-your-own-adventure guff for the 3DO and PC. Don't click through.
- "Just like the inspirations it cites, carry helps explore why we fight, and what happens to the people we send to war, all through the rules. The mechanics of the game work as well as the prose of The Things They Carried or the script of Full Metal Jacket in exploring life in the line of fire..." Sounds really interesting - games' unique ability is to convey meaning through systems, rather than prose, and it looks like carry really embraces that.
- "Take a break from your computer! Download, print and build your own pinhole camera. Follow the instructions and enjoy!" Beautiful.
- I love Jeff Bridges as a photographer, and his pictures from the Iron Man set are no exception.
- "Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize."
- "In a detailed technical feature with sample code, Team Bondi programmer Claus Höfele delves into the practical steps for your users to get gameplay footage automagically uploaded online." Good that this stuff is being published. This kind of stuff really isn't that difficult; the hard bit is recording footage from your game or framebuffer; the rest of the process is trivial, and hopefully coverage on sites like Gamasutra will help publicise this kind of interaction.
- "The point in pointing out these numbers, since we’re throwing out analogies to films and videogame innovation, is that it seems that no matter how well a movie is interpreted as “innovative” by a reviewer, the truest mark of success lies in its ability to inure itself with the consumer." No. Commercial success is just one kind of success, and films like Eraserhead have had a far greater impact on young filmmakers than any amount of box-office smashes. The real rarities are films such as the Godfather or Citizen Kane, which manage to be box-office smashes and innovative masterpiece.
- "Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will be so much more simpler and seamless and bug-free, I want to punch someone in the eye. They sound like a 5 year old who whines that they want a pink pony for their birthday." Julian has ubicomp fail.
- Satoru Iwata interviews the product designer and producer behind the Wii Fit balance board. There's some interesting stuff on the prototyping process on the second and third page of the interview.
- "I still consider glass to be an extreme craft – you’re working with and fighting gravity and momentum in those 60 seconds before it starts to harden – but you learn to take your time, even if there are lots of moments of extreme concentration to keep a piece from disintegrating." Chris writes up his glass-blowing course; sounds great.
- "Perhaps the problem is that we so deeply rely on reference points like film, which require stories progressing over time, when we could be referring to things like sculpture or painting, which require no timescale and people find just as moving." Some good thoughts from Jonathan Blow; I think his point about games' unique ability to challenge is an important one.
- "Rohrer is trying to make art in a medium that most people don't even think is capable of art. He can create this space of pure freedom, as artists have done in the past -- isolation, introspection, ascetic poverty. But ultimately he has to send these works out into the world, and people have to respond to them. And right now the audience doesn't know what to do with them." Fantastic writing from Esquire; mature, sensible, and at no point apologist.
- "The 'better sequel' mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don't want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I'm willing to blunder through if I'm going to get an experience I never had before." And this is why I've been sticking with it; I think Keith is on the right lines with this quotation.
- I really like the dot/tab/pad/board delineation, and the fraction/inch/foot/yard scale that accompanies it. A nice way of framing these issues.
- "Someday I hope game designers really are seen as trusted personal trainers, and that we have the chance to take people through proven processes that pay off in the long run. More gamesight, a surprising social safety net and support system, a more engaging environment, a higher quality of life." You trust a good designer to deliver good experience, regardless of the pain they put you through.
- "Unknown games are always the best ones... They are always stronger, funnier, cleverer and better-executed than their realities and so that walk home from the store, when the game is tangible in your hands but still imagined in your mind, is oftentimes the most potent moment in the videogame experience." A lovely piece from Simon on what the end of a certain kind of retail experience will really mean.
- "Steve Rose notes that the recent films have seen Bond visit and destroy as much villain-architecture as ever ("The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He's basically an enemy of architecture"), and suggests this can be traced back to Fleming's difficulties with Modernist architects." Rod on Bond is always good, and bonus points for the punning title.
- "A series looking at different aspects of guardian.co.uk's rebuild and redesign project, which ran from October 2005 to September 2008." Looks like there's going to be some good stuff emerging from this; great to see the Guardian making it so public.
- "Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel." Oh, that could come in useful
- "This shocking but real dialogue that features in this film gives a clear indication of how the UK today is demonising children." Powerful advertising, for a strong campaign.
- "We MUST keep arguing for, and ensure, that all our young people are valued, challenged and that the highest expectation what they can do and where they can go is the minimum they experience when they are in the education system. We’re failing them if we don't and if that's the case then get somebody in who can do it." Yes.
- "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.
- 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."