Links & notes for this month

• • Gamasutra - The Last Express: Revisiting An Unsung Classic
    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.
    (tags: games adventure lastexpress production development history narrative )
• • Chrono Trigger Review // DS /// Eurogamer - Games Reviews, News and More
    "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.
    (tags: games simonparkin reviews chronotrigger nostalgia childhood )
  • Play Auditorium
    "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.
    (tags: web flash games play audio sound music beautiful )
• • YouTube - Macy's Thanksgiving parade RickRoll
    Oh my. And I thought Astley didn't really like all the publicity from this. Clearly he's had a change of heart.
    (tags: rickroll rickastley macys thanksgiving parade awesome )
  • Fuzebox - Open Source Game Console
    "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.
    (tags: games hardware hacking electronics programming development opensource )
• • Economics of POW Camp
    "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.
    (tags: wwii economics camps prison pow money exchange barter trade society )
  • Fullbright: The immersion model of meaning
    "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.
    (tags: stevegaynor games immersion systems mechanics openworld narrative experience freedom meaning )
  • Simon Schama on the ultimate spaghetti bolognese | Life and style | The Guardian
    "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.
    (tags: bolognese recipe ragu cooking food )
  • Boing Boing: Offworld
    "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.
    (tags: offworld games blog writing alternatehistory atari nintendo )
  • The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
    "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.
    (tags: ige games mmo mmorpg wow worldofwarcraft everquest realmoneytrading economics goldfarming china )
  • Howies' Hand Me Down Bag
    "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."
    (tags: sustainability manufacturing consumption design product handmedown howies )
  • Rands In Repose: Dumbing Down the Cloud
    "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.
    (tags: sync design application trust interaction )
  • Gamers! With Jobs! | Gamers With Jobs
    "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.
    (tags: games writing )
  • rockets help build bridge higher than empire state building
    "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.
    (tags: engineering china bridges awesome design rockets )
• • Making art from barrels, part nine - the johnson banks thought for the week
    "...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.
    (tags: whisky art manufacture barrels type )
  • Bug Finder (Programming, Testing / Quality Assurance)
    "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.
    (tags: programming outsourcing humour turing computerscience )
  • Who Botches The Watchmen? » Murderblog 3D
    "Sweet! Quick time events? Combos? Finishing moves? It’s like they distilled Watchmen to it’s very essence. Wonderful."
    (tags: watchmen games comics licensing adaptation brawler bad wrong )
  • YouTube - Let's Play Plumbers Don't Wear Ties - Intro
    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.
    (tags: games plumbersdontwearties interactivemovie 3do horrible awful grim )
  • Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture
    "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.
    (tags: games tabletop narrative carry indie mechanics )
• • Corbis Readymech Cameras
    "Take a break from your computer! Download, print and build your own pinhole camera. Follow the instructions and enjoy!" Beautiful.
    (tags: pdf print pinhole camera pinholecamera photography beautiful )
  • JeffBridges.com - Ironman book
    I love Jeff Bridges as a photographer, and his pictures from the Iron Man set are no exception.
    (tags: jeffbridges ironman photography films movies behindthescenes blackandwhite panoramic )
  • The Screens Issue - If You Liked This, Sure to Love That - Winning the Netflix Prize - NYTimes.com
    "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."
    (tags: data prediction movies netflix modelling napoleondynamite )
  • Gamasutra - Share Your Experience: YouTube Integration In Games
    "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.
    (tags: youtube games programming development integration sharing web20 )
  • Just What is Innovation Really Worth?
    "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.
    (tags: wrong criticism innovation success games films movies reviews )
  • Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Ubicomp is like a 5 year old wishing for a pink pony
    "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.
    (tags: ubicomp fail design interaction futurism julianbleecker )
  • Wii.com - Iwata Asks: Wii Fit
    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.
    (tags: wii wiifit games fitness hardware interface controller design interaction prototyping )
• • Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: blown
    "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.
    (tags: glassblowing chrisheathcote teaching course art learning glass )
  • GameSetWatch - Braid's Blow: 'How To Make Games That Touch People'
    "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.
    (tags: games art braid jonathanblow migs talk presentation challenge difficulty )
  • Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire
    "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.
    (tags: games jasonrohrer design writing esquire art )
  • Keith Stuart: Do game reviewers really understand innovation? | Technology | guardian.co.uk
    "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.
    (tags: games innovation criticism writing keithstuart review mirrorsedge )
  • Tabs, Pads, and Boards (and Dots)
    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.
    (tags: ubicomp interaction design hci )
  • Avant Game: These Games are Experience Grenades
    "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.
    (tags: education learning games pain pleasure play design experience )
  • chewing pixels » Second Hand Memories
    "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.
    (tags: games simonparkin writing retail shops purchasing anticipation )
  • rodcorp: All that is solid melts into lair
    "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.
    (tags: rodmclaren bond kenadam jamesbond architecture )
  • An ABC of R2 | Help | guardian.co.uk
    "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.
    (tags: architecture software development design guardian publishing online blog )
• • Flare | Data Visualization for the Web
    "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
    (tags: flash programming library visualization dataviz infographics layout )
  • Barnardo's I Children in trouble online ads I Hunting ad
    "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.
    (tags: children advertising campaign society barnardos uk )
  • Hotmilkydrink: Vermin, feral, animals: Is this really how we view children?
    "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.
    (tags: children education research society )
• • Alistair.Cockburn.us | Nielsen on agile and usability
    "Just remember, 'There’s only us.'" Some good analysis; fair and even-handed.
    (tags: usability interaction design uxd ucd agile development web teams management )
  • TweetStalk
    "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.
    (tags: bad wrong antisocial twitter stalking inappropriate greasemonkey script )
  • Curmudgeon Gamer: Review: Mirror's Edge
    "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.
    (tags: mirrorsedge games reviews criticism commentary )
• • BibliOdyssey: Board Games
    Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over
    (tags: games play boardgames history )
  • Click Nothing: '...and let slip the blogs of war!'
    "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.
    (tags: games clinthocking blogs ar farcry2 )
  • War Unlimited: A blog by Reuben Oluwagembi
    The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.
    (tags: blog AR games farcry2 fiction narrative )
  • Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Boundaries, a tool to explore Flickr’s shapefiles
    "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!
    (tags: tomtaylor boundaries woe geo geolocation place flickr locative )
  • Ask H&FJ | Hoefler & Frere-Jones
    "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.
    (tags: typography type font design graphics jonathanhoefler )
  • Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player - WoW Insider
    "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!
    (tags: politics games wow mmo play awesome obama )
  • BBC Internet Blog
    "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!)
    (tags: moderation online community forum strictlycomedancing )
  • Versus CluClu Land: Stickin' Together is What Good Waffles Do
    "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.
    (tags: games design coop cooperative multiplayer online iroquoispliskin )
  • The Season Of The Witch | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    "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.
    (tags: johnwalker rockpapershotgun left4dead valve games design mechanics fear horror )
  • Insult Swordfighting: Sackboy's lament
    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.
    (tags: mitchkrpata littlebigplanet ugc games creation balance testing )
  • He has no words and must design « Magical Nihilism
    "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.
    (tags: games design talk lecture petermolyneux notes )
  • Respect the Character, p1 « BioWare Blog
    "...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."
    (tags: narrative story rpg bioware storytelling games )