Links & notes for this month

• • Have You Heard of Space Alert « Quinns
    "In Space Alert you and your friends make up the intrepid (doomed) crew of a Sitting Duck class exploration vessel. The way these ships work is that they’ll jump into a comedically hostile sector of space, spend 10 minutes scanning their surroundings, and then automatically jump you back out again. A game of Space Alert only ever lasts 10 real-life minutes, and during that time it’s the job of the players to listen to the ship’s hateful computer (a CD which comes bundled with the game) as it reels off what threats are approaching and from where, and then prevent these threats from destroying you in an orderly and professional manner. Surviving isn’t necessarily that hard, but the professionalism part? Impossible." Space Alert is brilliant. Even if most of our missions involved us falling over a lot, because we forgot about the screensaver. Quintin summarises it nicely.
    (tags: boardgames realtime spacealert quintinsmith )
  • You Don't Need a Games Consultant | Christian McCrea
    So, I began nodding my head a tad, but then halfway through it became clear that this is born out of a somewhat large chip on a shoulder, and that chip is primarily about "social games" (as they are commonly described), and that really, I don't agree with much of this. The "you" in question is quite narrow, and cheap shots like the notion that the title 'games consultant' has "an inherent tragic quality" don't help. Experienced, outside eyes often make things better. Does that mean there's going to be a cavalcade of barely-qualified games consultants in the impending gameificationpocalypse? Of course. Does that mean McCrae's point is true? Not really. Obvious disclaimer: I know several games consultants. They are all very good at what they do. They also bear no resemblance to what McCrae describes.
    (tags: games socialgames gamification strawman consultancy )
• • Verbatim and the facts « rotational
    "Trust is the key to breaking [this cycle]. And I think Talese’s method shows us how we might gain it: by checking with our subjects and making sure we understand what they’re trying to express, beyond what they actually say. Because if our subjects are interesting enough to report on, they’re deserving of respect. And if we respect them, they will respect us. That’s a much more virtuous circle." I think Alex is right, you know.
    (tags: games journalism trust respect writing quotation )
• • Gamasutra: Ben Lewis-Evans's Blog - My Heart on Halo
    "I am currently using heart measurement equipment for an experiment as part of my PhD and for fun (N=1 isn't usually great Science) I thought I would bring the equipment home last weekend and see what my heart looks like when I am playing a mutliplayer game of Halo Reach (Slayer DMRs on Zealot - Blue Team). Here is what I found."
    (tags: halo science games experiment )
  • This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers. | openDemocracy
    "Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy." I know that the rhetoric works better as a speech than in writing; still I can't help but agree with this. It tugs at things important to me, and what a small village public library meant for my childhood.
    (tags: libraries politics phillippullman society uk )
• • The Saddest Game in the World | Five Players
    "Oregon Trail pioneering is basically the story of trying to get 500 pounds of jarred bison over the border before succumbing to necrotising poison from eating the wrong kind of strawberry. It’s the story of dying at Chimney Rock with bits of Conestoga wheels lodged in your skull. When you look into the Trail, the Trail looks back into you."
    (tags: games oregontrail sadness dysentry )
  • Maurice Franklin, Wood Turner | Spitalfields Life
    "If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship."
    (tags: woodturning wood shoreditch history craftsmanship )
• • Wolfenstein 1-D: The Game That Changed Everything, Converted to a 1-Pixel Line
    "In 1992, Wolfenstein 3-D revolutionized video games and created the 3D first-person shooter genre. Now, after decades of development, Wolfenstein 3-D has been converted to breathtaking, epoch-making 1-D. You can now play the game in a single, dazzling one-pixel line." Title-sequence and everything. Spot-on. Much like Cow Clicker, if you're going to make the joke, you have to make the game.
    (tags: wondertonic games wolfenstein parody )
• • Bay Area Hiker: Home page
    (tags: walking hiking sf bayarea america )
• • Ben Bashford - Notebook of Things - Emoticomp
    "Unless the behaviours and personalities of these things that compute are designed well enough the things that are not so good about them or unavoidable have the potential to come across as flaws in the object’s character, break the suspension of disbelief and do more harm than good. Running out of batteries, needing a part to be replaced or the system crashing could be seen as getting sick, dying - or worse - the whole thing could be so ridiculous and annoying that it gets thrown out on its ear before long." Lots of cracking stuff in this: designing personas, making personalities that aren't annoying, persona-design as role-playing or improv.
    (tags: ubicomp personas acting improv design benbashford )
• • YouTube - Law & Order: UK - Lessons in British Justice
    Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)
    (tags: culture tv bbc )
  • Fraser Speirs - Blog - How the iPad Wants to be Used
    "The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.
    (tags: ipad assumptions computing use fraserspeirs )
  • scraplab — Admiralty Chart Correction Tracings
    "Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.
    (tags: maps charts navigation diffs paper )
  • Ian Bogost - Cowclickification
    "Here at the Cow Clicker ranch, we've learned an important lesson about cow clicking: people don't just want one chance to click a cow every six hours. They want as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." And then Ian launches the API. And Connect. And everything else. And wins again.
    (tags: cowclicker socialgames gamification ianbogost games brilliant )
• • Valve talks Portal 2 on PlayStation 3, Steam on 360
    "Giving a PS3 owner of Portal 2 the ability to also play their game on the PC and Mac is an extension of this philosophy. From our perspective, it's not two copies of a game; it's the same game, but with Sony's help we've worked out a method to allow that Portal 2 PS3 customer to also play their game on the PC and Mac." ...is the right answer. Well done, Valve.
    (tags: games portal2 valvesoftware )
• • The Systematic Integrity of Expression
    "The nature of an interactive medium should be the feedback loop between the player and the game; to not explore (or, at least, consider) the expression space of this cycle seems to be a missed opportunity." Trent raises some good points about the relationship between narratives and the systems that tell them.
    (tags: games systems narrative mechanics )