• "Analog a la carte is an experiment I (@urtubia, @bigrobotstudios) am conducting for rendering sequences on real synths remotely. This webfrontend will enqueue sequences into a job list that is read by a raspberry-pi at "headquarters". Once the raspi receives the job, it then both sends the sequence via midi to a synth and records it in realtime. Finally it encodes the resulting audio file into an mp3 file and uploads it to Amazon S3, so that this server is nice and ready for getting more sequence requests."
    (tags: synthesizers music analog web )
  • "About 1 minute and 4 seconds after Gunpoint became available for pre-order on the evening of Monday the 27th of May, it had recouped its development costs. This was not entirely surprising, since the only direct development cost was buying Game Maker 8 for $30 three years ago.

    The surprising bit happened next." It is really lovely that Gunpoint has worked out so well for Tom. It's an interesting little game, and I'm glad he's going to keep poke "interesting" games rather than having to make a pile of money. Well done him.

    (tags: tomfrancis games development gunpoint )
  • "A lot of the stuff going on just isn’t very ambitious. ‘The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean,’ wrote Alexis Madrigal in an essay about start-ups in The Atlantic last year. ‘Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.’" Still thinking on this article a bit. It touches on lots of things I have issues with – the startup scene, and in particular the US startup scene, and the usefulness of what it makes; wrestling with the idea that making IS value, something I do a lot; having watched recent Bret Victor videos, what something meaningful would work like. But also: it reminds me why I've chosen some of the work I have recently, that values are something you reassess and fight for, that value isn't just curing cancer or better pill bottles, but also charm and joy and wit and provocation and art. (It's probably not another niche dating service).
    (tags: employment culture programming writing startups values )
  • "Which game is being called the Citizen Kane of games?" This is why I love Mitch Krpata.
    (tags: games videogames ohvideogames mitchkrpata citizenkane )
  • "My challenge to you is as follows. Design a game which is appealing to play, which will go on to be a huge commercial success and yet illustrates through its systems the abject and total horror, the inhumanity, the alienation, the banality, the evil, and the hell-on-earth of a socio-political practise taken to extreme. The game must be named honestly. It must be easy to learn. It must be a game for all the family." As expected, this is great, but of course it is, because Martin is great. More to the point: it's shrewd and useful. (And: excellent nous from Cara to pick up this piece from someone who clearly could become a major games journalism talent. Please keep commissioning this "Martin Hollis")
    (tags: boardgames design games martinhollis systems capitalism monopoly )
  • Truly beautiful: a games console built around patchcords, in Eurorack format; the system exposed to the user, and directly manipulable. The direct manipulation of the physics is kind of brilliant, the more I think about it. Just wonderful.
    (tags: console patchbay patchable eurorack games gorgeous )
  • "Aside the proportions and general ‘80s cuteness, I get obsessed with the PC Engine’s moulded details. Such fine relief work doesn’t seem to appear on modern consumer electronics; it’s all transfers, printing or stickers these days. I personally think really good relief moulding is something of a lost art so it’s nice that the PC Engine has a surprisingly large amount of such details." Which Tony goes on to describe and photograph at length. Lovely post about a beautiful little piece of hardware – but which Tony loves for its stains, scorching, and dust.
    (tags: patina dust stains plastic games injectionmoulding pcengine )
  • "i'm tired of feeling like i'm writing to 17 year olds when i write about games. if we can't accept a base level of validity to the thing we're talking about without having to constantly feel shame and prove and defend its existence, then i'm not interested in participating in discussions surrounding games. it's stupid and boring to have so much of the talk be constantly channeled through that. who cares what Roger Ebert or whoever else who never played a videogame thinks or has thought. games are games and they can do good or bad things depending on how they're used. they're only just one tool." Yes, all of this post, and this in particular. I like games; I also like books and films and art an all manner of things. Culture is culture, and I engage with it all in a pretty similar way. A nice piece of writing expressing that, though, and reminding us of the ways we _can_ engage with our cultures and media.
    (tags: games culture media consumption )
  • "Though I lost the original notebooks, I still have the journal. It stood in a complex relationship with, and served as a feeder for, the actual writing of Climbers, which went on concurrently elsewhere; also as a record of one of happiest and most productive times of my life. The pages were carefully numbered. The photographs, especially polaroids, have become faint and dark-looking at the same time, tinged with purples and greens not present in the lived scene." Beautiful documentation of work in progress.
    (tags: books climbers mjohnharrison process writing )
  • "Truth be told, I’m a bit tired of pixel art, but work like this aspired to transcend mere pixels. And I think that’s why it still packs a punch for me today. It’s evidently not content with the paltry colour depth and resolution it’s forced to use. It’s not about celebrating its form, unlike today’s pixel art, which is all about the form and evoking aesthetics of the past without quite nailing their fundamental nature. Instead, these backgrounds are all about what they depict – little scenes, ripe with little stories and humour, and inflected with travel pornography." Great writing from Alex, and a lovely cherrypicking of the selection. I am not a huge SNK fan, systemswise, but I adore their background art – and have a particular fondness for the whole package of Garou: Mark of the Wolves. This post does a lovely job of explaining why.
    (tags: games fighters art 2d snk alexwiltshire )

Nostalgia for the MUD

21 April 2013

In a Belgrade bar, over a dark lager, Joanne interviewed me for Nostalgia for the Net – the oral history of people’s first encounters with the Internet that she and Melissa Gira Grant maintain.

My interview is now online. In it, I talk about my first online encounters before the Internet proper – over Wireplay, BT’s dial-up gaming service that simulated IPX networking for DOS games of the mid-nineties. And, more specifically, my time in MUD2, their recreation of the Essex MUD.

It’s a story I’ve told before, but I don’t think in public, so I don’t feel bad about repeating myself. You might enjoy it.

I have fond memories of the time I spent in the MUD. Reading old transcripts, I see player names I haven’t seen for years but have vivid memories of – as vivid as you can get, when you only have text to go on. The graphics were years ahead of their time, so to speak. It was a small community, but a tight one, and very friendly. It didn’t have the feature of MOOs, but still rewarded creativity in your interactions and encounters. And there was something about it – in the Land, in the writing, in the world, in the interactions – that felt very… British. Our own little corner of the net.

A small community still exists, playing in a Land I can map almost from memory (though I’ve forgotten the route through the mines to the Dwarven realm now).

Happy memories. Nice to share them over a beer.

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