"Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model." This kind of proscription (or encouragement) of behaviour is interesting, and I think there are a variety of ways to do it "sensibly". And: how did you expand the group of "people who fit its prescribed social model"? Small changes of behaviour, amongst larger groups, are much, much more interesting.

"Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down." Sad, really.

It's the hip-hop-songs-as-charts meme, but about being a PC gamer. Moderate chuckles abound.

Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over

"I must admit that I would have loved to get this richness of backstory into the actual game itself, but the longer pipeline of game asset development and integration made that impossible." Clint Hocking explaining the background behind the fictional blog for Far Cry 2.

The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.

"A few weeks ago we released our shapefiles via the API, and while most people were excited, some folks were a bit confused about what it all meant. Which is why Tom Taylor’s beautiful Boundaries application is so exciting. It helps you visualize the Flickr community’s twisty changing complex understanding of place." Tom is on code.flickr.com! Hurrah!

"Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment." A brief history of pixelfonts.

"Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild." This is exactly the kind of thing I was banging on about at Gamecity. Presentation online soon!

"We're still going through the stats, but at the time of writing there were almost 170,000 messages on the Strictly [Come Dancing] board." Holy hell. Poor moderators. (And: for such an uninteresting story, as well!)

"If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse." Iroquois on co-op, and the way Left 4 Dead sees online co-op – and the bad behaviour of players online – as design problems to solve, rather than to ignore.

"Who designs a character for gamers to never go near? Who spends the time to create the most terrifying creature imaginable, and doesn’t impose it on players? Well, clearly Valve. The temptation to have her be aggravated from great distances, to force her to attack when encountered, must have been there. But then she’d have lost her power. Her power comes from just sitting there. It’s that benign, ragged, vulnerable form. It’s the combination of singing and crying. Oh God, the singing *and* crying." John Walker examines the horror of Left 4 Dead's Witch. A little over-written perhaps, but he totally nails the fear the character instills, and the way you always notice her a split-second too late.

Mitch just isn't inspired by user-generated content, no matter how charming a core game might be. The comments thread on this one is really good.

"The next generation on from them – e.g. Jonathan Smith, Doug Church and of course Greg Costikyan (from whose classic essay on developing such a critical language the title of this post is lifted) are always eloquent, passionate and insightful speakers and spokespeople for their medium. Unlike Molyneux." Not too annoyed I missed this, given Matt's comments.

"…the players are there for their character, not for your story. Your story is just the path for their characters, the medium through which they can play their persona. Once the GM realizes this, they should then realize that respecting the player and the character is paramount to their story. And it’s a surprisingly easy skill to master, because it really is as simple as recognizing what the players and characters want, what they came to do and then give it to them."

"Demeter quit his bank job two months ago and has launched a company, Demiforce, to develop more electronic games. Now he has a salaried staff, five games in development and two coming out by Christmas, including a spinoff to "Trism" called "Trismology."" I hope his success continues; scaling up always seems scary, but Trism was – and is – superb.

"The conundrum is that no path, no vision of progress – technological, social, moral – will be plausible today if it does not include the complexity of costs, yet it will not be desirable if it does. That makes our society blind." Some good, if dense, Kevin Kelly.

"I wrote a script that lets you see what this money could buy if we weren’t throwing it at second-rate comedians or third-rate bankers. What if we spent it on schools, or teachers, or wispas instead? My script lets you see that by altering the text of Guardian articles as you browse." Ben's hack was brilliant in its simplicity, and really does change the way you read the news.

"Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods." Location-based game that forces you to travel out of your normal areas, and potentially explore transport networks. Also: not designed around specific devices, just laptop+wifi.

"Fallout 3 is a tribute to intent. It's not a rallying cry for any cause or even a cautionary tale about the hypothetical horrors of nuclear holocaust. It's a statement on the worthlessness of inaction. It's about not staying in the vault."

"Far Cry 2 doesn’t so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player as it does to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, letting the player loose in that world." One of my favourite pieces of writing on FC2, if only because it captures the nature of the game so well.

"Oddly, although Left 4 Dead only comes out today, Gamestop.com has already switched from their previews to reviews. You'd think that wouldn't be enough time for their users to appraise the game. You would even think that they'd want to play the full game before trumpeting their thoughts and throwing around phrases like "game of the year." You would be wrong." Mitch is harsh but fair.

"See what's been discovered by the Wasteland inhabitants!" Collaborative slippymap of what people are finding in the DC Wasteland in Fallout 3.

"Images don't automatically attach to emails. I hope you and your husband can work things out though." Oh dear.

"For all the prioritizing and severitizing (which costs a lot of time during bug input) the best method of bug sorting was human communication." Yes. Too much time has been lost in too many custom installs of JIRA.

"Hi everybody, I'm Brandon, and this is Offworld." Oh! This could be good.

Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.

"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.

"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.

Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.

"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.

"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.

"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.

"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.

"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).