"I like co-op games where the other player gets a beer, not a second controller, but can still be utterly pivotal to the outcome of a game." Yes, that, and indeed, all of this lovely post from Margaret. I should return to FTL – I played a lot of it last year, and loved it, even if it mainly was a game about seeing how quickly somebody would asphyxiate when the Oxygen Machine blew up. Again. Sigh.

"The best lectures are also full of what the Elizabethans called ‘lively turning’ – strange juxtapositions, leaps of thought, rhetorical tricks, jokes and the element of surprise." Very true – a nice piece by Joe Moran on lecturing in the MOOC age.

"Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither. It’s important that we make the distinction between the two undertakings because, amidst all this confusion, we’re losing sight of the question of what would happen if we really did apply the deeper powers of game design to more everyday things – if we really did gamify them – and that question is a fascinating, exciting and troubling one. I really hope we get a chance to explore it properly." Margaret, on good form, as ever.

"In principle, the pressure ought to be off, since you've got a infinitive lives and a stock of smart-bombs. In practice, the game quickly becomes so pulsingly busy that I not infrequently become blind to the position of my own ship. I'm still playing – still winning – but have no visual awareness of the bright white claw I'm actually steering. The bit of my brain that handles moving knows where it is, but the bit of my brain that does the thinking has no idea, and they very rapidly start screaming at each other." Margaret's new column for Gamasutra goes live (hurrah). Talking about this was one reason I got sucked back into Deadline very deeply a few weeks ago. Deep enough to edge beyond randomness, towards a semblence of mastery, and at least understand the system. At least enough to understand quite how fine it is.

This is great. Brandon is smart. And: when he says "story", he doesn't mean story. He just means "show me something new".

"WonderLab was three days of performers and playmakers coming together to do what you do in a lab – tinker, theorise, experiment and make. A fantastic group of musicians, writers, composers, actors, directors, producers, commissioners, game designers, coders, artists and philosophers and spent three days sharing their brains. I’ve rarely had a greater treat than getting to lead their explorations." Margaret on lots of things, including the marvellous Wonderlab (which is where I've been for the past three days).

"…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."

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.

"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."

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.

"…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.

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.