Links & notes for this month

• • Alistair.Cockburn.us | Nielsen on agile and usability
    "Just remember, 'There’s only us.'" Some good analysis; fair and even-handed.
    (tags: usability interaction design uxd ucd agile development web teams management )
  • TweetStalk
    "Sometimes you want to follow someone on Twitter, but you don't want them to know you're following them. We present to you TweetStalk ‒ the simple way to stalk Twitter users without having to follow them." Oh for heavens' sake.
    (tags: bad wrong antisocial twitter stalking inappropriate greasemonkey script )
  • Curmudgeon Gamer: Review: Mirror's Edge
    "A man can only eat so many cheap sniper shots, so many deaths by machine gun from over 75 meters away, so many attempts at a final tricky jump to a tiny ledge across a giant gap, so many degrading restarts... Sometimes I hate games so very much." Sadly, much of this is pretty true.
    (tags: mirrorsedge games reviews criticism commentary )
• • BibliOdyssey: Board Games
    Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over
    (tags: games play boardgames history )
  • Click Nothing: '...and let slip the blogs of war!'
    "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.
    (tags: games clinthocking blogs ar farcry2 )
  • War Unlimited: A blog by Reuben Oluwagembi
    The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.
    (tags: blog AR games farcry2 fiction narrative )
  • Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Boundaries, a tool to explore Flickr’s shapefiles
    "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!
    (tags: tomtaylor boundaries woe geo geolocation place flickr locative )
  • Ask H&FJ | Hoefler & Frere-Jones
    "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.
    (tags: typography type font design graphics jonathanhoefler )
  • Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player - WoW Insider
    "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!
    (tags: politics games wow mmo play awesome obama )
  • BBC Internet Blog
    "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!)
    (tags: moderation online community forum strictlycomedancing )
  • Versus CluClu Land: Stickin' Together is What Good Waffles Do
    "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.
    (tags: games design coop cooperative multiplayer online iroquoispliskin )
  • The Season Of The Witch | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    "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.
    (tags: johnwalker rockpapershotgun left4dead valve games design mechanics fear horror )
  • Insult Swordfighting: Sackboy's lament
    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.
    (tags: mitchkrpata littlebigplanet ugc games creation balance testing )
  • He has no words and must design « Magical Nihilism
    "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.
    (tags: games design talk lecture petermolyneux notes )
  • Respect the Character, p1 « BioWare Blog
    "...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."
    (tags: narrative story rpg bioware storytelling games )
• • smule's ocarina (tecznotes)
    "We've seen this all before... [but] these Smule globes seem strangely different and much more interesting, largely I think because you hold the phone in your hand instead of the laptop or monitor on your desk. It's a more personal, touched engagement with the screen that makes visualizing an earth-spanning army of phone lighters and flute blowers more physically personal."
    (tags: geo supercontext application design context shared activity engagement interaction )
  • The Brainy Gamer: Second thoughts
    "But succeed or fail, my awareness of game design is omnipresent, and I like it that way. It enriches my experience of playing. The in-world experience remains my first thought, but my second thought is nearly always focused on the system, especially when that system demonstrates originality or beautiful execution. I don't think I'm the only gamer who behaves this way." No, but it requires a certain degree of awareness of the medium to think about the second; the first is much more immediate, and the second is about an engagements with games, rather than a particular game.
    (tags: games fallout openworld choice freedom design narrative )
  • Big Contrarian → It just goes to show.
    "If I only have so many hours in the day to devote to genuinely insightful things, Gladwell’s track record screams at me to ignore Outliers. At least for now. At least until I’m stuck on a cross-country flight, liquored up, and ready for a good fight." Jack Shedd is bored of anecdotes.
    (tags: writing journalism anecdotes evidence science malcolmgladwell )
  • Life Lexicon
    "This is a lexicon of terms relating to John Horton Conway's Game of Life." Very comprehensive, with lots of examples.
    (tags: conway gameoflife life game reference )
  • We Are Sleeping Giants
    Ignoring the background music and a lot of Trajan, I really like this series of pictures from Brooks Reynolds; particularly, his use of lighting and depth of field. I'm a big fan of concept-series; they tend to be more than a sum of their parts.
    (tags: photography series projects brooksreynolds americana )
  • YouTube - Bike Hero
    I don't care that it's not playing the game or anything, there is no way in the world that this is anything less than super-awesome.
    (tags: guitarhero bike cycling video pastiche amazing )
• • Developer strikes it rich with iPhone game - CNN.com
    "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.
    (tags: programming iphone cocoa trism demiforce games development )
  • Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
    "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.
    (tags: scfi future dystopia futurism progress development society )
  • Thinking of the numbers — Techbelly
    "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.
    (tags: ghack1 guardian hackday numbers greasemonkey script context )
  • TURF BOMBING
    "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.
    (tags: urban locational gaming play space geo locative )
  • GameSetWatch - Opinion: Fallout 3 - Escape From Vault 101
    "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."
    (tags: vault fallout3 games writing bethesda criticism )
  • Far Cry 2's slow burn | Procedural Dialogue
    "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.
    (tags: farcry2 criticism games emergent openworld )
  • Insult Swordfighting: Gamestop.com User-Submitted Previews: Left 4 Dead
    "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.
    (tags: mitchkrpata reviews left4dead games internetpeople )
  • Fallout 3 Capital Wasteland - Planet Fallout
    "See what's been discovered by the Wasteland inhabitants!" Collaborative slippymap of what people are finding in the DC Wasteland in Fallout 3.
    (tags: fallout games fallout3 maps mapping ugc )
  • Apple - Support - Discussions - Pictures automatically attach to e-mail? ...
    "Images don't automatically attach to emails. I hope you and your husband can work things out though." Oh dear.
    (tags: iphone apple adultery unfortunate forum thread )
  • Custom fields? We don't need no stinking custom fields
    "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.
    (tags: bugtracking bugs jira customfields projectmanagement prioritisation )
  • Boing Boing: Offworld
    "Hi everybody, I'm Brandon, and this is Offworld." Oh! This could be good.
    (tags: brandonnn boingboing games blog )
• • Amazon.co.uk: Wenger Swiss Army Giant Knife: Sports & Leisure
    "For even if all it does is sit ceremonially on your mantelpiece next to a bar of Toblerone and a signed photo of Swiss Toni as a tribute to all things Swiss, you will have achieved greatness, my son." Best. Product. Description. Ever. (This feels like an April fool, but apparently no).
    (tags: swissarmyknife crazy insane huge awesome )
  • Tiscali Games - Watchmen galerie obrazků
    Oh jesus it's a Watchmen videogame and it's been converted... into a free-roaming beat-em-up. Rorschach in Streets of Rage 3D. Shoot me now.
    (tags: badidea games watchmen alanmoore comics tiein licensing movies makeitstop )
  • The Adventures of Lil’ Gardner & Robot Jesus » Archive » Keep Squid Alive
    Yes.
    (tags: comics watchmen squid )
  • The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products
    "ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors ("Buddy's Bug Hunt/1935") to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence. For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services featured in Warner Bros. cartoons (made by the original studio from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog."
    (tags: acme manufacturing cartoons reference products tv )
  • chewing pixels » Animal Crossing - Wii review
    "...while almost all of the game’s residents are free to go as they please, heading off to new towns and lives on a whim, once you step off the bus and choose a house in which to settle, you’re here for good.... you are the local constant, the hick who’s never left its borders and there is some comfort in the knowledge that the places the other animals leave for can never be known by you." Simon's original version of his Wii Animal Crossing review; some lovely analysis of the series to date.
    (tags: simonparkin games writing journalism wii animalcrossing nintendo )
  • http://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk/
    "Uses the Flickr shapefiles to show you where the world thinks its neighbours are." Damnit I wish Tom would stop magicking up awesomeness all the time.
    (tags: geo location geolocative flickr bounadries woe places geography psychogeography maps )
  • Little Shit Planet - My World is Small and Crap
    ...and bloody frustrating too.
    (tags: onebutton games flash littlebigplanet parody )
  • Games Without Frontiers: Victory in Vomit
    Clive Thompson on how Mirror's Edge "hacks" your proprioception: "it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic."
    (tags: wired clivethompson article writing games mirrorsedge motionsickness proprioception )
• • Nodalities » Blog Archive » A data-centric view
    "The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.
    (tags: data flickr reuse information tools geodata mapping )
  • A format only robots could love (Phil Gyford: Writing)
    "Some people love this kind of aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love. This is rubbish... There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information." Phil talks about some problems he's been trying to solve with dashboard displays.
    (tags: information aggregation dashboards comments philgyford )
  • Our Man In Northrend | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    "A magnificent, huge orca-like beast, swimming calmly through the vast ocean beneath my smoke-belching craft. She was a beauty. And she instantly became my Moby Dick. “I’m coming back for you”, I thought. Big Shirl is a reason to reach level 80. I have no doubt the grind will get to me before too long, or that the thought of repeatedly running the same dungeons or battlegrounds come level 80 will turn me off all over again... In these early days though, before everyone in it knows everything, it’s an explorer’s paradise. That’s why I play MMOs." A nice, thoughtful article from a first look at WotLK from Alec Meer
    (tags: wow wotlk lichking expansion mmo mmorpg writing exploration )
  • GameSetWatch - On PixelVixen707, Brinkvale Insane Asylum, & Slow Burn ARG Craziness
    "Wow. Ever get the feeling you've been thrown for a loop? I did just that, when I worked out that GSW commenter and erudite game blogger, PixelVixen707, appears to be not just a smart game blogger, but a fictitious front for some kind of damn weird ARG/online story." Down the rabbit hole we go, again.
    (tags: arg criticism games writing rabbithole journalism )
  • Alan’s Kiloblog » GitHub and Git: Sharing Your Code, for What It’s Worth, Without a Begging Entry into Open Source Communities
    "SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people... This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer. I love the pivot."
    (tags: git github community programming development opensource )
  • GameSetWatch - Opinion: Mirror's Edge: If Looks Could Kill
    "At the start it seemed reasonable to think that Mirror's Edge could stand entirely on the merits of its brilliant core concept, and not need to include extraneous and negligibly attractive features to appeal to as many people as possible. But, no, this is the video game business." This is the stuff that's scaring me most about Mirror's Edge.
    (tags: games mirrorsedge dice ea business marketing )
  • The Brainy Gamer: The big ignore
    "...in recent years, [the stage has] moved away from those practices. Today, we better understand the importance of offering kids the very best we can do. They are no different from the rest of us. They respond positively to quality, and they quickly grow bored and restless with mediocrity... We might consider a similar approach to video games. If we want our kids - heck, if we want all of us - to enjoy quality games, we must pay attention to and promote those games that deliver quality."
    (tags: children entertainment games art quality criticism michaelabbott )
  • Fallout 3 - a set on Flickr
    From Duncan Harris; postcards from post-apocalyptic DC.
    (tags: screengrabs games fallout3 washington apocalypse beautiful )
  • CS193P - Cocoa Programming | Announcements
    Course notes from Stanford's Cocoa programming course.
    (tags: cocoa macosx development programming mac iphone )
• • Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) - Vox
    "The touch screen method of controlling the ship brings this fact out into startling clarity and suddenly your perspective shifts like you've been staring at a poster of messy green and red ducks in a row and suddenly you can see the fricking sailboat for the love of god, YES! FINALLY!" Simon explains why rRootage on the iPhone makes sense. (It does: your finger both controls the ship and obscures it, so your finger _becomes_ the ship, and now you're just guiding your finger through the bullets).
    (tags: rrootage iphone shmup kentacho games play shooter simonwistow )
  • TidBITS iPod & iPhone: Comparing Five iPhone File Transfer Apps
    Five different apps that share data between your Mac and your iPhone in a variety of potentially useful ways.
    (tags: iphone sharing apps filetransfer )
• • Geometry Wars: retro explained Interview - Page 1 // Xbox 360 /// Eurogamer - Games Reviews, News and More
    Jolly good interview with Stephen Cakebread and Craig Howard from Bizarre Creations about the evolution of the Geometry Wars series. In a nutshell: simple games, simply made, and then honed to perfection, or as near as you can get. It's the honing that's important
    (tags: eurogamer interview bizarrecreations games development arcade geometrywars )
  • Between Video Game Download - Jason Rohrer Games' New Between - Esquire
    "Somewhere, across whatever barriers stand between, is an other." Jason Rohrer's new game is for two.
    (tags: games multiplayer jasonrohrer play )
  • BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Russia church 'stolen by thieves'
    "A 200-year-old church building has disappeared from a village in central Russia, officials from the Russian Orthodox Church say... It was intact in July but some time in early October thieves made off with it brick by brick." Um.
    (tags: russia theft news funny )
• • Code: Flickr Developer Blog » On UI Quality (The Little Things): Client-side Image Resizing
    "IE 6 is a riskier proposition, but can show improved image resizing when the AlphaImageLoader CSS filter is applied, the same filter commonly used for properly displaying PNGs with alpha transparency." Oh, that's interesting.
    (tags: ui polish ie6 ie internetexplore web development image sizing )
  • ME 2D Beta at Borne Games
    Mirror's Edge 2D flash game - which look, by all accounts, to be an official spin-off. Can't wait to see the full version; it's a very impressive little game.
    (tags: mirrorsedge games flash online free )
  • Abstract Heresies
    "You want to know what I think? I'll tell you what I think. Here's what I think: Java Java Java is is is too too too damn damn damn verbose verbose verbose. That's what I think. And I'm sticking to it. So there."
    (tags: java criticism formfollowsfunction programming development )
  • The Nietzsche Family Circus
    "The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote." This one is particularly good.
    (tags: comics webcomics nietzsche )
  • Video: Stop-motion cutout Mega Man versus LEGO, pasta - Boing Boing Gadgets
    Wonderful, wonderful, stop-motion trailer for a Megaman 9 built out of the real world. Hypnotic, and lovely.
    (tags: games megaman rockman stopmotion animation lovely )
  • Scott To Pass Go For Monopoly Movie
    "Director Ridley Scott will helm the bizarre big screen adaptation of popular boardgame Monopoly... According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ridley will give the Monopoly movie a futuristic edge akin to his 1982 epic Blade Runner... The unlikely subject matter is just one in a line of Hasbro games to get big screen makeovers as part of an exclusive pairing with Universal Studios... Transformers filmmaker Michael Bay is producing a Ouija Board feature, while a film version of beloved classic Battleship is also in development." I know what "development" means, but still, this is the craziest games-to-film news I've seen for quite some time. Hollywood is strange.
    (tags: boardgames hasbro ridleyscott movies films hollywood crazy monopoly battleship adaptation )
• • urban knitting: the world's most inoffensive graffiti
    "there's a new form of graffiti in town, and it's extremely pleasant. so pleasant that i can't imagine even the harshest critics of regular graffiti getting wound up. i mean, who in their right mind would come face to face with a sweater-wearing tree and do anything but smile?"
    (tags: urban street art knitting inoffensive harmless gentle hipster )
  • Lost Garden: Fishing Girl: Game Prototyping Challenge
    "...there are dozens of talented programmers who live outside of Seattle who can’t participate in our weekly chats. This makes me sad. So I decided to share some of our graphics as part of a brand spanking new game prototyping challenge. Free graphics + new game prototyping challenge = Happiness." Lovely idea. Wouldn't mind trying this at some point.
    (tags: flash games design project danc prototype )
  • chewing pixels » Guitar Hero: Mars Tour
    "There are many reasons one might want to book a commerical space flight, but fleeing Earth just to reclaim rights on a crappy thrash metal midi track you made in Guitar Hero: World Tour when you were 16 and had way too much free time is never going to be one of them." EULA fail.
    (tags: eula guitarhero activision moneygrabbing greed games rights )
  • YouTube - Little Big Planet - Mirrors Edge
    It's something a bit like the first 2-3 minutes of Mirror's Edge. But in LittleBigPlanet. People are great.
    (tags: mirrorsedge games ugc creativity littlebigplanet )
  • cityofsound: Wi-fi structures and people shapes
    "I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user [...], I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library." Some lovely work by Dan Hill.
    (tags: visualization technology wifi space architecture behaviour buildings activity mapping danhill )