Good stuff on prototyping and development – especially around the _pace_ of prototyping.

'I once asked an old friend, through a thick haze of smoke, what he liked most about a cigarette, to which he replied, "It frames a moment."' Will Davies on fine form; this is interesting and thoughtful and not so much about nicotine as it is about ritual.

Linked almost everywhere by now, but still: a marvellous, marvellous game, dead simple to play, thoughtful, and well-paced. A must-play, really.

"To extend the "director" metaphor, Left 4 Dead's AI Director was a bit like Alfred Hitchcock: a master of suspense. Left 4 Dead 2's AI Director (dubbed AI Director 2.0, conveniently enough) is perhaps from a younger generation of "torture porn" filmmakers. In place of suspense is sheer brutality and instead of tiptoeing along the precipice of failure, you're pushed over. And over. And over." Much as I'm enjoying L4D2, I think this is an appropriate metaphor: it's not just that it's hard, it's that it's *relentless*; the suspense of L4D is missing a bit.

Simple paintings of arcade games. Pretty!

"The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it’s the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it’s the social reverence for the library-like quiet — you don’t yell in a bookstore, you’ll piss off the books." I never tire of linking to Michael Lopp.

"Pit is a wonderful game, probably the best game released in 1904. I imagine that Wheedle came about by Knizia taking a look and saying to himself "that's interesting… but I think I can do better." And so he did." Ooh, this sounds good!

"But we are spoiled. Spoiled to the core. As a kid, when I skipped to the Odeon to see Watership Down, popping back via my granddad's house, if he asked me what I'd watched, I'd recount it in glorious detail. It was the 70s. He didn't do spoilers. He was a grown man. He'd spent two years in a trench during the Battle of Monte Cassino getting his hair parted by bullets, so whether Hazel the cartoon rabbit got squashed while out hunting cartoon carrots wasn't really his concern." I am largely spoiler-immune; I always argue that *how* something happens is more important than *what*. Apart from, you know, the massive ones that are at the core of things. Anyhow, Grace Dent doesn't care either.

Well Played is now out, and can be read online and purchased from Lulu. It's exactly the sort of thing I've wanted for a while – a reader for videogames, and for the actual experiential side of them – and it's got some great authors contributing pieces on a host of games. Worth your time, for sure.

"I’ve never seen this visualization before. Whoever created it should be publicly applauded." Yes.

"Another word for "pacing" is "storytelling". We never really tell stories to players; we just put them in games. Then players tell our stories to themselves." Interesting analysis of pacing in games, and what the demands games make on pace are. And, of course, that quotation.

"Jarate is neither affiliated with, nor a substitute for, Karate." The Sniper's new weapon: a jar of piss. The way this update has unfolded has, basically, been totally awesome.

Roo writes up his first experiments with his microprinter. The barcode stuff is particularly interesting.

"Hackers across the country are buying up old old receipt printers and imaginatively repurposing them into something new. We call them microprinters." pbwiki site for gathering resources around microprinters. Nice! Still waiting on mine (from the same load as Roo's) to arrive, though…

"With that in mind, I present to you a gallery of paintings made by one Hoenikker J. Troll, hunter at large and painter at other times. He dragged an easel and paints all around this world. Of Warcraft." WoW screengrabs run through artistic filters. Some are really quite pretty, as, to be honest, is the source material.

"…video games are driven by the player, experientially and emotionally. Fictional content–setting, characters, backstory– is useful inasmuch as it creates context for what the player chooses to do. This is ambient content, not linear narrative in any traditional sense. The creators of a gameworld should be lauded for their ability to believably render an intriguing fictional place– the world itself and the characters in it. However the value in a game is not to be found in its ability at storytelling, but in its potential for storymaking." Some commentary on the scale of storymaking games offer, from Steve Gaynor. Also: I like the word "storymaking", as opposed to "storytelling".

A pretty comprehensive list, I think.

AASM is "a library for adding finite state machines to Ruby classes. AASM started as the acts_as_state_machine plugin but has evolved into a more generic library that no longer targets only ActiveRecord models." And as a result, I might be using it a bit.

That's sad; he was a fount of statistics since I first listened to TMS, and long before that.

"By wrapping and extending Flash 8's sound API, SoundManager 2 brings solid audio functionality to Javascript." Dark voodoo. Dark, clever, voodoo.

This was actually a pretty good tutorial for the jQuery UI Slider control, if only for illustrating how much code – notably markup/styles – you have to provide before the slider works.

Kyle Gabler of 2D Boy gives the first Global Game Jam keynote. Seven minutes, seven tips, packed with goodness. He's not wrong.

"I’m much more interested in automated nostalgia than automated presence – data feeds that gradually acrue in your wake, rather than constantly dragging your focus on to the next five minutes." Yes.