Links & notes for this month

• • Steven Poole: Working for the Man
    "On this definition, obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing." Some good writing from Steven Poole on games and chores.
    (tags: work games writing play ethics mechanics )
  • Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides
    "My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications." Some really good insight, presented in a very clear manner. DanC is, as usual, on fire. Need to digest this slowly, but it certainly overlaps with a lot of my thinking.
    (tags: games design play application interaction web userexperience )
  • GameSetWatch - Opinion: On Far Cry 2's 'Slow Burn'
    "...the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world -- a fascinating prospect." This captures a lot of the great things about FC2 well, and in an even-handed manner. The lack of handholding is jarring, but the possibilities it opens up are wonderful. For a tense, hectic, genre, it's interesting to see an entry that's by turns soothing and surreal, amidst the malaria, bushfires, and wholesale slaughter.
    (tags: games story narrative play emergence openworld farcry2 )
  • YouTube - Drawing With Water: Making the Art for ALAN'S WAR
    Just like magic. Lovely.
    (tags: drawing illustration ink water comicbook graphicnovel )
  • Breaking Video: The Simpsons Spoof The Mad Men Intro - Parodies - Videogum
    Spot-on, as you'd expect.
    (tags: humour simpsons madmen pastiche tv )
• • matt.west.co.tt » Blog Archive » JSSpeccy: A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript
    "I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is - probably the most stereotypical project I’ll ever come up with." Blimey.
    (tags: mattwestcott spectrum emulation programming javascript woah )
  • faker
    "Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc."
    (tags: tool testing data ruby gem programming rails )
  • Game Design Advance » The Designer’s Dilemma: The Freedom to Fail
    "Losing is an opportunity that individuals deserve, and allowing the state to sweep in and save you from the consequences of your own actions robs you of a certain kind of agency." Fantastic article about the difference between win/lose and quit/finish. Lots of good stuff in here - a must-read.
    (tags: games communism design play success reagan )
• • Fraser Speirs – Two Macs: Fail.
    "An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.
    (tags: sync syncrhonization mac hardware computers computing fraserspeirs )
  • Coffee houses and civil liberty « Derivadow.com
    "Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.
    (tags: security intelligence spying coffeehouse )
  • Battle of the CSS Frameworks | Capsize Designs
    A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available - particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.
    (tags: css design code web layout framework prototyping )
  • Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs - NYTimes.com
    "A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.
    (tags: books library colombia southamerica travelling )
  • Flaming Lips frontman's double-neck 'Guitar Hero guitar' - Joystiq
    "Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar...'" Awesome.
    (tags: guitarhero waynecoyne guitar instrument hacking flaminglips )
• • Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Lessons Learned while Building an iPhone Site
    "Developing this site was very different from any other project I’ve worked on; there seems to be a new set of frontend rules for developing high-end mobile sites. A lot of the current best practices get thrown out the window in the quest for minimum page weight and fastest load times over slow celluar connections. Here are a few of the lessons we learned (sometimes painfully) while developing this site." Really excellent article from code.flickr on building their new mobile/iPhone site.
    (tags: none)
  • Tactical Assassin Substratum | GameKrunch
    Jolly good (and nasty) stick-figure assasination game; involves a lot of patience, but nicely executed.
    (tags: none)
  • Joyce Walks because somewhere sometimes it's always bloomsday
    "Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical art project which generates walking maps for any city in the world based on remapping routes from Ulysses allowing users to create a mashup of their own walk to be shared with other users both on the Joyce Walks site and as embeddable maps on any site."
    (tags: none)
• • GPSTagr: geotag flickr photos using GPS
    Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.
    (tags: none)
  • uplog » » Coding a Networked Bike
    "We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."
    (tags: none)
  • IF Competition: General Reflections and Favorites « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
    "This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop..." Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.
    (tags: none)
  • geotag-lightroom-plugin - Google Code
    "This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."
    (tags: none)
  • Huffduffer
    "# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.
    (tags: web application webapp hfdf podcast filtering social aggregation )
  • T=Machine » Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers
    Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.
    (tags: design web games industry comparison development product )
  • Trends in Japan - CScout Japan Blog » Bandai RPG Pedometers animate your steps
    "Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. ... [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."
    (tags: games ubicomp pedometer talkingshoe rpg design interaction )
  • jordanmechner.com » Blog Archive » October 20, 1985
    Jordan Mechner is serialising - and backdating - his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.
    (tags: animation video jordanmechner princeofpersia )
  • The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story - Jordan Mechner
    "In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.
    (tags: writing jordanmechner games script princeofpersia pop popsot )
  • The Unfinished Swan
    "The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.
    (tags: xna games monochrome blackandwhite 3d npr nonphotorealistic abstract surreal stylised )
• • Save the Videogame
    "We need a National Videogame Archive. Luckily, we've just started one. We're going to preserve videogames for the nation. For better or worse. Forever. It's going to be brilliant..." Oh, that it is. Jonathan Smith on *every single bloody thing* that's perfect about Micro Machines 2 on the Mega Drive is a highlight so far.
    (tags: videogames uk nationalvideogamesarchive archive history historiography preservation )
  • Portabledev - CommanDSKeen
    Commander Keen on the DS. Heck yes. One of the first games I spent a *lot* of time playing.
    (tags: games homebrew ds nintendo nintendods commanderkeen )
• • ds brut
    "DS brut is an open source hardware prototyping platform for the Nintendo DS, developed by and for electronics enthusiasts, artists and game developers. By connecting the Nintendo DS to the outer world, the game console can be easily hooked up to a variety of sensors (e.g. GPS receivers) and can itself control all different kinds of actuators, servo motors and others."
    (tags: programming hacking hardware electronics connectivity nintendods ds )
• • GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS
    "The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does not work. Tests are not something that should be left for the inexperienced; tests are the hard part."
    (tags: programming development ruby rails rubyonrails testing thoughtbot )
  • Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidiential Debates - Who's the Windbag?
    "The analysis presented here explores word usage in the 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify characteristic value and personality traits."
    (tags: words wordle visualization linguistics syntax analysis politics debate )
  • Build Your Own Marriage Proposal
    "How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring." This is amazing in so many ways, not least of which that she wasn't the first person to paly it.
    (tags: littlebigplanet mores social marriage engagement games play creation ugc brilliant )
  • Finding the Time to Bleed - Team Fortress 2
    "The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script-specifically that there were supposed "similarities" between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator."
    (tags: writing valve tf2 script humour funny predator roadhouse )
  • Longshot Comics » Comics Worth Reading
    "Each issue of this unique title is 3,840 half-inch-square panels of nothing but dots talking to each other. The concept is that everyone is drawn so far away that all you can see is a dot. And the dots do stuff. Like smack each other, or give birth, or die. It’s brilliant, it’s hilarious, and it’s mind-blowing."
    (tags: comics longshot shanesimmons )
• • Glider Gun
    Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.
    (tags: futureplatforms blog conway gameoflife namesofthings )
  • Wilson Miner
    Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.
    (tags: design xhtml css web grid colour )
  • World Exclusive: Love, The First Video | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    Jaw well and truly on the floor.
    (tags: games pc mmo massive love independent development eskilsteenberg beautiful )
  • rodcorp: Maintenance, or the keeping of too much at hand, having delivered too much
    "Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
    (tags: service history maintenance servitude delivery )
  • zengestrom.com: Social objects, power, stickiness, and love
    "An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
    (tags: srs web socialobjects jyriengestrom socialsoftware sociology culture needs wants )
• • Wonderland: Turbine's MMO 2.0 pres
    Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine - the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.
    (tags: turbine web games mmo play social socialsoftware )
  • BigRedKitty: Hunter-pets in 3.0.2 - WOW Insider
    Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?
    (tags: wow worldofwarcraft patch reference hunters pets )
  • Kongregate Labs
    "Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!
    (tags: tutorial flash games kongregate programming )
  • Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets « OUseful.Info, the blog…
    "So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.
    (tags: yahoo google wikipedia cloudcomputing web tools scraping )
  • russell davies: design engaged the second
    "The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.
    (tags: ubicomp spimes design spam cities totalexperiencedesign data visualisation information advertising )
  • YouTube - Samsung Omnia (i900) Unboxing
    This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.
    (tags: youtube samsung marketing wilfullyfictional advertising unboxing pastiche )
  • chewing pixels » Death of a Gamesman
    "And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.
    (tags: games culture play writing simonparkin )
  • Announcing the New York Times Campaign Finance API - Open - Code - New York Times Blog
    "The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."
    (tags: api election campaign politics america newyorktimes nyt webservices )
  • Politics, GTFO
    "Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."
    (tags: games advertising politics campaigning )
  • Apple - MacBook
    Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).
    (tags: manufacturing factory apple video notebook macbook aluminium milling )
  • ANTREPO4.COM OUTPUT REPORT: Movie Posters with brand integration
    "Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.
    (tags: typography design branding productplacement posters movies )