Contains photographs of a PIG in TINY WELLINGTON BOOTS.

"The problem with all this is that we're asking the wrong question. The “are games art?” question is boring…
The interesting question, to me, is what /kind/ of art games are. That is, we should be asking ourselves what kind of formal dynamics and pleasures are inherent in the medium, and be able to identify when these formal capacities are used well." Sensible, rationally thought out, and also a reminder as to /why/ Kane is used as a benchmark. "Command of formal capacities" is an important phrase.

"Clearly we had not been invested enough in the narrative."

Francis has gained his own clothing line, and I need this shirt like a red wizard needs food.

"I came up to Will Wright after the panel and I asked him this question. Is this urge to dominate these fictional systems just human nature, or is it something we've learned? Have years of 8-bit humiliation at the hands of games designers turned us into this kind of gamer, or is this just how the third chimpanzee is wired to behave?" Lots of good stuff here about domination vs understanding, mastery, learning, and the sterile utopias we so often turn systems into.

"…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.

"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.

"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.

"…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.

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.

"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.

"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).

"…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.

It's Oregon Trail, but where you take everybody's favourite emo band on tour of the states. Surprisingly deep and detailed, an affectionate tribute to Apple II entertainment and the rigours of being a touring rock band. It is very silly, and somewhat ace, and will be getting a blog post in due course.

"Tips and tricks only the pros knew, UNTIL NOW! Get ready to PWN up some NUBS on Xbox Live and get some MAD BP'S BRO!" I'm pretty sure I've played this guy.

"These are just various photos taken during the development cycle of the businessib. Enjoy them. We hope you think they are as hilarious as we do." Oh my word.

"If you keep the city and concentrate on putting more world into it, imaginativeness becomes the primary obstacle– you can add things into this city without having to add much physical space and new assets. There's legions of empty storefronts and empty buildings, waiting to be filled. And media– web sites, radio stations, tv shows– don't take up space either. Think of this cheap empty space as a place to tell new stories, because as a developer, you are good at this." Iroquois, hitting many nails on the head all at once, again.

The Guardian Open Platform launches, with their Content API, their Data Store, and a selection of client libraries for the API (one of which I did a smidge of work on). This is not just a good thing, it's a good thing Done Right, and I'm looking forward to what's next from the Open Platform team.

"A collection of accidents that happened while working on maps and other graphics." Bloopers from interactive infographics. Delightful; the patina and happy accidents of the 21st century.

Custodian is the Ruby gem for accessing the Guardian Open Platform Content API that James Darling, Kalv Sandhu, and I (although my contribution was minor) built. There's a Google Code link to it, but I'd imagine the github version is where the action will be.

"You may not know his name but you will certainly know his work: Morris Cassanova (aka Mr Chicken) designs and makes signs for most of the fried chicken shops in the UK." That's a good market to have sewn up, I'd imagine.

Jones annotates his screengrabs from the James Coburn classic; lovely to see it all captured so well, even if I'd disagree that the plot is a thing of "gossamer" – it's a _tiny_ bit thicker, surely?

"Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture." Which puts it nicely, but god, this is depressing.

Very, very good – reminds me a bit of Galcon, but it's much more resource-driven and less twitchy. Nice and simple, and well-executed.

"Arrrr me harteys. Thar be a meatship ahead in the oven…. Floating high on the 17,000 calorie seas, made with Bacon, sausages, pastry, mince, it's all meat, and it's coming to rape and pillage your arteries! Har har!" Uh-oh.

"The key point, it seems to me, is to recognize that gameplay has tonality. Just as music, a non-representational medium, can evoke certain moods and emotions, game mechanics can elicit emotional states." Some good thoughts here about games as Gesamtkunstwerk.

"The only difference between the end of Pownce and the end of Magnolia was that just one of those pieces of plug-pulling was planned. From the perspective of the people running those services, that’s a huge difference. From my perspective as an avid user of both services, it felt the same."

"The game's hook is quite simple: upper-case Helvetica words fall slowly from the top of the screen, and you drag a missing letter from each to its properly kerned spot. The closer you are and the faster you manually drop the word, the better you do. Miss your goal by an inch and you lose a life… errr, ligature, which you can gain back by being right on the spot." Hah! Must try that.

Pup ponders the heat-death of the universe. Beautiful, and a lovely use of space, too.

"CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes including communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areas entails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources – equipment, procedures and people – to promote safety and enhance the efficiency of flight operations."

Scrapes lots of things, produces a useful page which actually manages to stay up. Also, it spells TRANSPORT CHAOS the only way it should be spelt: in capitals.

Named for the year the BJP was founded; nicely written, and not just a fast-moving press release stream.

All Kenta Cho's code on wonderfl.

Kenta Cho's making stuff on wondfl, in ActionScript. This example is ASCII-based bulletty goodness.

"So perverse as it might sound, I'm going to plead for less choice in video games. It's a paradox: by limiting the player's discretion, you can expand the narrative possibilities of the medium. Coercion can create a kind of emotional heft that you can't achieve within the confines of the empowerment-myth." All true, and FC2 is a fantastic example of this. But: this is just one way of making games. More of this, yes, but don't forget all the other approaches.

"write Actionscript3 code in a textarea, and your code will be compiled server side. Your compiled Flash will be reloaded automatically in the right side of the page, so write code and see it real-time." And you can fork other people's code. It's like github and Heroku all at once, but for Flash.

"And so my holiday was spent with games on the opposite ends of the spectrum: World of Goo's patient instruction versus Shiren's school of hard knocks. And despite their different approaches I felt that each, in their own way, did credit to the core competence of games as a medium: inspiring the pleasure of finding things out."

"Bio i am a house elf but no one understands me. i like wearing black tea cozies, listening to my chemical romance, and bdsm. sometimes i do emo weed with hermione." Fanfic invades Twitter.

In its entirety, on Google Video.

"Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.

"Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.

"'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' … It's because computers are fire… If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process–documentation, as it were–but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."

This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.

The Offworld 20 "…isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.

"Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it… turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.

"…my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological– lighting effects, texture work, mocapping– but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."

"…it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."

"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.

Big guide to levelling hunters. Lots of good hunter stuff on here, actually, which muggins needs to learn quite fast.

"What I like about the rhetoric idea is that it places the accent on how the work operates on the player, and this is essential for an interactive medium. What I don't like is that it's a resolutely utilitarian framework for critical analysis: it focuses in on the way that games might change our opinions for good or ill at the expense of the way games might transport, entertain, humiliate, and ravish their users." Pliskin on Bogost's Procedural Rhetoric; both the post and its comments are smart, nuanced discussion around the idea.

"There was a correlation between their performance on the game and their improvement on certain cognitive tests, Kramer said. Those who did well in the game also improved the most on switching between tasks. They also tended to do better on tests of working memory." Playing the game (Rise of Nations) didn't affect all tasks, but it had improvements on some – seemingly those involving task and process management.

"Regardless of the dubious value of trying to dubiously value the art, one thing is immediately clear: in a reversal of casino logic, we value the rarity of the green stripe: 0, house wins."

"Even sweeter, the folks at Pinball News have a clip from Pinball Expo 2004 where Medieval Madness sound designer Dan Forden plays a few takes of a mid-20s Tina Fey that didn't make it into the game. It's all a little too perfect, you know?" Super-awesome.

"Timex sets their watches to precisely 10:09:36 while Rolex waits almost a minute until 10:10:31." Some lovely observations collated by Kottke.

"Prince of Persia isn't Ninja Gaiden, and this is OK, because it's not aiming for the same tension-filled experience. It's a game that wants to be lyrical. It wants to be an musical instrument rather than a crucible, and it succeeds in this goal." Point taken. I might end up giving the Prince a chance, when my current crop of challenge-heavy games is worn down.

"Zapm is a science fiction roguelike game by Cyrus Dolph. It's my humble attempt to create "the sci-fi Nethack". It is very much a work in progress."