Links & notes for this month

• • Versus CluClu Land: I Went to the GDC and I Learned How to Make Broad Cultural Generalizations
    "...after spending this weekend fighting Resident Evil 5's grabasstical interface I am somewhat persuaded that there's a real divide when it comes to eastern and western design sensibilities, and this divide has everything to do with the design-centric and productivity-centric tendencies of North American tech culture." Which is an interesting way of looking at it; I'm going to hold my thoughts until Iroquois has written more on this. Manveer Heir (of Raven Software) leaves an interesting comment on the post.
    (tags: games design culture programming development eastwest iroquoispliskin productivity interaction )
  • Playdar - Music Content Resolver
    "Playdar is a music content resolver service - run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and friends' music collections." Feels a lot like Audioscrobbler did when that first launched; it'll be interesting to see what user-friendly services get wrapped around it.
    (tags: music audio playdar lastfm resolver server access listening )
  • PushButton Game Engine
    "The PushButton Engine is an open-source game engine and framework that's designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences." Flash and Box2D from the looks of things. This could be really, really interesting.
    (tags: flash games programming development engine actionscript )
  • Commissioning for Attention Part 1 - Read Me! « TEST
    "...these ideas have been massively influenced by friends working in game design, agile website design or service design. Narrative media is still (outside of gaming) light-years behind the curve compared to the work going on in these disciplines, so a lot of the time I’m trying to act as a translator - taking concepts and ideas from more functional design disciplines into narrative/editorial contexts. When I speak to indies or producers, there’s a set of blogs/presentations that I tend to refer them to, so I thought i’d start by sharing this reading list." This looks like it's going to be an excellent series from Matt Locke.
    (tags: mattlocke crossplatform media design comissioning planning trends advice data platform )
  • GameSetWatch - GDC: Keita Takahashi - The Complete GDC Lecture
    Takahashi being wonderfully perceptive and making some interesting observations. Also, describing some lovely design decisions in the beautiful, soothing, and bonkers Noby Noby Boy. I still need a soundtrack CD for that game.
    (tags: keitatakahashi nobynobyboy ps3 psn development design games play fun )
  • It's not a race (Phil Gyford’s website)
    "Sheeeeeeeeeeeeit! BBC, you just don’t deserve to get your hands on these shows." Yes - whilst we all binged on the Wire when we had it on DVD, that doesn't mean that the "binge" is the correct method of consumption. 60 episodes across 12 weeks? Madness, and I say that as a Wire fan.
    (tags: tv thewire bbc scheduling madness )
  • Dave Gorman: When Twitter Gets Weird...
    "Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).
    (tags: davegorman twitter culture mores etiquette socialsoftware manners )
  • Liking something the wrong way (Phil Gyford’s website)
    "...I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.
    (tags: behaviour interaction design socialsoftware twitter flickr manners mores online )
• • Defensive design: Magnetic zones on the unibody MacBook - (37signals)
    "...removing the screws made it clear that the magnetic zones serve a second function. When my screwdriver slipped, the screw didn’t fall into the depths of the case. Instead, it flew right over to the magnet, and I was spared the pain of extracting a three-millimeter needle from an expensive electronic haystack."
    (tags: design apple hardware defensive dualfunction )
  • The Subtle Art of Persuasion
    James Box on interaction design as behavioural modifier. I really enjoyed this - mainly for its thoughts on architecture, branding, marketing, copywriting, rather than just on pure IXD. Some interesting products in there, too. Worth another look.
    (tags: jamesbox interaction design interactiondesign behaviour architecture persuasion presentation )
  • Teaching Kids Programming - O'Reilly Radar
    "I think there's a lesson here: doing something in hardware isn't automatically cool, particularly for kids. It's harder to make things happen, so we veteran geeks get a thrill from it. We think that because it's physical, real, and a Robot, kids will automatically be excited. But for kids who are learning, and who don't appreciate the significance of the challenge, it's just hard and unrewarding."
    (tags: programming computing education teaching children physicalcomputing hardware electronics )
  • Convertbot - Tapbots
    This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about around a year ago - the value of bespoke, beautiful UI to interact with mundane code; people aren't just paying for software here, they're paying for interaction design.
    (tags: iphone interface design interaction interactiondesign app conversion utility )
  • What does one TRILLION dollars look like?
    "...these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like." A nice, simple piece of amateur informatics that is a good wake-up call.
    (tags: money visualization finance economics bailout us )
  • Quick and dirty slides
    Margaret's slides from GDC2009. Even without the notes, there's clearly some great meat here, and "Stop Wasting My Time And Your Money" has some stonkingly good moments - notably, the discussion of the HL2 lambda, and a great, great Sam Beckett gag.
    (tags: margaretrobertson gdc2009 slides presentation games story narrative play spore education )
• • Links » More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa
    "in other words: Please ensure that there is absolutely no way for your customer to know whether we are showing the form or you are. In fact, please train your customer to give their “Verified by Visa” password to anyone who asks for it." Eesh. I knew I never licked VBV, but this just proves, accutely, *why* I don't like it.
    (tags: internet security phishing verifiedbyvisa banking online )
• • Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo - Part 1 « Music Machinery
    Ooh, this looks like a very interesting write-up of a thoughtful SXSW session. Marked as something I need to follow up on.
    (tags: toread music recommendation collectiveintelligence filtering code )
  • Failure and Learning | A Games Design Blog
    "You don’t need to be able to lose for a game to be enjoyable or challenging. You just need to be able to fail." Some good notes on the purpose of failure in games, and how to sensibly work failure as a mechanic into games without irritating players.
    (tags: design games play learning progress failure feedback )
  • YouTube - Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)
    The Klein Four are "the premiere a capella group of the world of higher mathematics". Judging from this video: yes, so they are.
    (tags: music video humor maths mathematics closeharmony kleinfour )
• • Gamasutra - News - GDC: Clint Hocking On Improvisational Success Through Design Failure
    "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.
    (tags: design games play farcry2 clinthocking gdc09 )
  • Wolfenstein 3D Classic
    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
    (tags: programming games iphone development idsoftware johncarmack wolfenstein )
  • Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos
    "Tattoos from books, poetry, music, and other sources." As with all tattoos: some are misspelt, some are a bit blah, some are beautiful.
    (tags: writing art tattoo books literature bodyart poetry quotations tattoos )
• • YouTube - Where the Wild Things Are Teaser Trailer March 25 2009
    Arcade Fire + looking like it's on 16mm + looking like somebody loved it, rather than they just loved CGI = oh wow, this could be quite exciting, even if it ends up being a bit weird.
    (tags: movies trailer spikejonze wherethewildthingsare )
  • COPE: James Wallis levels with you » Eliza asks questions
    "Her mind is a marvel and her future is going to be extraordinary. I will strive to be her Cape Canaveral, and let her carve a streak of light across the world. She will leave me far behind, and I will love her even more for it. For that, and for an infinity of other reasons, and for the wonders she will see and the fearlessness with which she will deal with them, she is my heroine." A beautiful piece from James about his daughter. I failed to do anything for ALD, and not because I wasn't thinking hard on it. I should probably explain why at some point.
    (tags: children writing adalovelaceday jameswallis )
  • Indie Games Summit: Polytron debut new Fez trailer - Offworld
    This is very beautiful, especially the 4-colour CGA cave, although Brandon's commentary makes me realise there's a generation of kids who don't know what "CGA" is, or why you'd care about graphics modes.
    (tags: games indie offworld fez trailer cga graphicsmodes )
• • Pitchfork: Poptimist #21
    "We write and listen and play music in a cultural environment in which there's intense excitement and anxiety around the idea of music as a social object, not just a commercial one... in order to understand better the ways in which songs are becoming lines in listeners' conversations, we need different ways of thinking about how they've played that role for musicians too." Tom Ewing on music as fanfiction.
    (tags: music sampling fanculture fanfiction tomewing poptimism answerrecords )
  • The Nun and the Archimedes - Reprocessed
    "After she left, the school began to switch away from Acorn computers to Windows PCs, and computing at school became less and less about actually wrangling the machines for their own sake: programming went away, to be replaced by word processing and the other kinds of useful activities which I'm sure helped a lot of pupils gain the kind of computer literacy they needed for the real world, but it wasn't the kind of computer literacy I needed. I needed the more abstract, joyful, engagement with computers that Sister Celsus provided, and which could only have been provided at the end of the 80s." A lovely post for Ada Lovelace Day from Matt.
    (tags: design education learning computing bbc dtp mattpatterson adalovelaceday archimedes )
  • Ghost in the Machine - a set on Flickr
    "In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels." Just gorgeous.
    (tags: art film photos tape cassette images )
• • Beautiful Data | O'Reilly Media
    "With this unique book, programmers, administrators, and others who handle data can learn by example from the best data practitioners in the history of the field. Modeled after O'Reilly's highly-acclaimed book, Beautiful Code, Beautiful Data lets readers look over the shoulders of prominent data designers, managers, and handlers for a glimpse into some of the most interesting projects involving data. In an engaging narrative format, the authors think aloud as they explain their work, highlighting the simple and elegant solutions to problems they encountered along the way." Oh. This could be lovely.
    (tags: book publishing data visualisation informatics oreilly )
  • Gamasutra - Features - Game Writing From The Inside Out
    This is both good and bad in places; I'm not totally convinced by the "What would players rather shoot -- a wall, or a Nazi?" argument, but I'm very interested (as per my previous writing on Far Cry 2) in notions of non-player characters as protagonist; the player as lens through which story emerges, rather than hero of said story. Stuff to think on, for sure, but I'm still working out how to respond to this; I'm not sure it fulfils its goal of discussing "how writers and designers can collaborate smoothly and successfully"; it just shows me some examples.
    (tags: design games writing narrative story structure protagonist )
  • Rands In Repose: The Makers of Things
    "We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act." This is good.
    (tags: history making newyork engineering construction building inspiration )
  • Photojojo » How to Develop Film Using Coffee and Vitamin C! Srsly!
    Chemically, this makes sense, but I'd never thought this might be possible.
    (tags: homebrew photography film processing developing )
• • The elements of networked urbanism « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
    "A summary of what those of us who are thinking, writing and speaking about networked urbanism seem to be seeing: fourteen essential transformations that, between them, constitute a rough map of the terrain to be discovered."
    (tags: future cities networks urbanism adamgreenfield )
• • Prezi - The zooming presentation editor
    "With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way." Oh. Now that looks interesting.
    (tags: animation software presentation tools )
  • pats_quinade: Dollhouse! The Lost Episode
    "See, you're doing that zany goofball routine, but Xander and Wash never made sex slaves, so it kind of doesn't work." Seriously, this is the most accurate summary of Dollhouse you can imagine. If I'd been playing the drinking game, my liver would be dead by now.
    (tags: pastiche funny josswhedon summary dollhouse drinkinggame notmakingittosweeps )