Oh, lovely: using Inkle to write a historical adventure in epistolary form – or, rather, drafting and redrafting a letter to be sent. And: by Emily Short! I'm glad someone's got around to that format.

"So, given this [zero-button, move and look] interface, whence interactivity in Dear Esther? I say: from an understated but deadly-precise sense of attention design through spatial design.

You walk along the beach; a path goes up the bluff, another along the strand. You go one way or the other. There are no game-mechanics associated with the choice, and a plot-diagram analysis would call them "the same place" — you can try either, back up, and go the other way. But this misses the point. Precisely because the game lacks keys, switches, stars, and 1ups, it has no implicit mandate to explore every inch of territory. Instead, you want to move forward. Backtracking is dull. Worse: given the game's sedate walking pace, it's slightly frustrating. (They left out the run button for a reason, see?) Moving into new territory is always the best-rewarded move, and therefore your choice of path is a choice. You will not (unless you thrash hard against the game's intentions) see everything in your first run-through." Cracking writing about immersive, environmental storytelling in Dear Esther, and why it's clearly a game.

"…he still remembers his frustration at encountering "sliced-up ghettos of thought" – sculpture, architecture, fashion, embroidery, metalwork, product and furniture design all in separate departments – "which I don't believe are absolute. It's just the way we categorise things and the way we chose to educate people."" Quite excited to see the Heatherwick show.

"Super-simple baseline .mobi templates. Here ya go."

It's basically a satellite that's an external Android peripheral, and they're chucking it into space with a phone attached. Impressive.

"Finch realised what he really wanted to do; to "make things people could both use and enjoy"." Yes, that.

"We don’t want readers to “master” our inklebooks: we want readers to nurture them. The stories they contain are precious, fragile things, that like any good story might turn at any moment." Yeah, this – moving away from "what happens" to "how it happens" as a tenet for interactive fiction.

"Elizabeth David was a revelation for me. She was a wonderful prose writer and it was a habit that carried over in to her recipes which are often maddeningly vague. You would be forgiven for wondering whether there are recipes at all. They are really just a handful of paragraphs that serve as a rough guide in the general direction of the dish you're trying to make. The recipe that follows is much longer than anything she'd write." Yeah, but it still looks amazing, Aaron.

This is brilliant: mp3s of the little mod/tracker music tracks that accompany keygens, cracks, and intros. Hundreds, and it's strange to say "hey, PHOTOSHOPCS4CRK is my favourite!" A weird little bit of culture, perfectly captured.

IF legend Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin has adapted Jason Shiga's marvellous "Meanwhile" for the iPad. If you wanted someone to adapt your interactive fiction for another format – I can't think of a better person. Really looking forward to seeing how they've done this.

"A photograph has to be rational. It has to be rational in itself. It has to be rational and complete. … it is the illusion of a literal description of what the camera saw. From it, you can know very little. It has no narrative ability. You don't know what happened from the photography. You know how a piece of time and space looked to a camera." As usual, I'm reminded how much I love Gary Winogrand.

The ninth day of the Hindu Navaratri festival, the "Worship of Implements", where "weapons are worshiped by soldiers, and tools by artisans"; "In the cross cultural development that has revolutionized the society, with modern science making a lasting impact on the scientific knowledge and industrial base in India, the ethos of the old religious order is retained by worship of computers and typewriters also during the Ayudha Puja, in the same manner as practised in the past for weapons of warfare."

Jon is smart, and one of the best writers of interactive fiction (in all its forms) that I know. So I am looking forward to this.

Marvellous. Can't say any more – you need to read this (very) short story – but it's really, really lovely: shivers down the spine, and something heartwarming, all at once. And: set in a slightly magical part of the world.

"…the insight I had playing Indigo was that map-based games, while non-linear in gameplay, are inflexible in narrative. There’s nothing variable about the story that emerges in the player’s head: it’s authored, split up, and distributed across the game like pennies in a Christmas pudding. All that changes is the pace at which it appears. But in time-based games, everything the player does is story, and so that story is constant flux.

To put this another way:

Map-based games are ludicly non-linear but narratively inflexible.

Time-based games are ludicly linear but narratively flexible.

(Of course, these are spectrums: some games, like Rameses or Photopia are ludicly linear and narratively inflexible, and some, like Mass Effect, at least endeavour to be ludicly non-linear and narratively flexible.)
…
Do readers want to interact, toy and play with fiction, or alter, bend and shape it?" Jon Ingold is smart.

Really ought to make some of this sometime; I'm a sucker for onion jam/marmalade, ad it's so easy, I have no idea why I haven't tried it before.

"So is it worth reading dusty IF history? Well, I haven't read it yet. But I can say that the book really represents a tour through the past ten years of the IF community's thinking. Some of the essays are from 2001; some have been revised for this edition; some are brand-new. Many have been published in other forms, so if you've been devouring our blog posts and essays for the past few years, you will see few surprises. But if your awareness of IF dates from the last century — or if you've been following us only casually — I think this book has something to offer."

"NOTE: This is a demake of the third level of Irem’s 1987 arcade game R-Type, retold as an interactive story. You'll need a dice to make rolls and something to write down your armaments (and points if you wish)." Brilliant.

"More sea metaphors." This made me laugh a lot. (cartoon in Prospect).

"These are clearly black market frankenproducts – made from a combination of surplus mobile phone components and car alarm key rings. I wonder how much they actually cost to manufacture. I wonder if the bits are stolen." Ben Bashford on the magic of Shanzai. And, of course, when a video camera is eight pounds, it's no longer precious, and you start doing weird things with it: Youtube is full of examples.

"Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change. Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters and their perceptions and understandings." This looks both bonkers and brilliant.

"Data combined with narrative creates personality. It can be used to construct a larger and richer history around a subject.

The world is already divided in to two camps: People who are going to watch the Super Ball and those who aren't. This is an opportunity to delight the former and reach the latter, by providing a larger and more playful cast of characters to describe the events during the game." Nice!

"The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a slideshow plugin that supports many different types of transition effects. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and much more." It's efficient and well-documented, too. Thumbs up.

"Over on a forum called teamliquid, a user by the name of Lomilar posted a fairly long thread about a program he had written that optimized build orders for the zerg race in starcraft. He eventually cleaned up his code and posted the code to googlecode. The program is called EvolutionChamber (a clever name, as it’s the name of one of the buildings in the game), and it uses genetic algorithms to find build orders. This I had to see." Great analysis of EvolutionChamber. Super-interesting, too, as a concept.

"I think the appeal lies in the keys moving “on their own,” and in the fact that it is in the guise of a familiar object." Nice little project – self-typing typewriter that plays Zork.