"…after spending this weekend fighting Resident Evil 5's grabasstical interface I am somewhat persuaded that there's a real divide when it comes to eastern and western design sensibilities, and this divide has everything to do with the design-centric and productivity-centric tendencies of North American tech culture." Which is an interesting way of looking at it; I'm going to hold my thoughts until Iroquois has written more on this. Manveer Heir (of Raven Software) leaves an interesting comment on the post.

"Playdar is a music content resolver service – run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and friends' music collections." Feels a lot like Audioscrobbler did when that first launched; it'll be interesting to see what user-friendly services get wrapped around it.

"The PushButton Engine is an open-source game engine and framework that's designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences." Flash and Box2D from the looks of things. This could be really, really interesting.

"…these ideas have been massively influenced by friends working in game design, agile website design or service design. Narrative media is still (outside of gaming) light-years behind the curve compared to the work going on in these disciplines, so a lot of the time I’m trying to act as a translator – taking concepts and ideas from more functional design disciplines into narrative/editorial contexts. When I speak to indies or producers, there’s a set of blogs/presentations that I tend to refer them to, so I thought i’d start by sharing this reading list." This looks like it's going to be an excellent series from Matt Locke.

Takahashi being wonderfully perceptive and making some interesting observations. Also, describing some lovely design decisions in the beautiful, soothing, and bonkers Noby Noby Boy. I still need a soundtrack CD for that game.

"Sheeeeeeeeeeeeit! BBC, you just don’t deserve to get your hands on these shows." Yes – whilst we all binged on the Wire when we had it on DVD, that doesn't mean that the "binge" is the correct method of consumption. 60 episodes across 12 weeks? Madness, and I say that as a Wire fan.

"Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).

"…I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.

"MOBY is a spout cover that brightens up the bath while keeping baby’s head safe from bumps." As swissmiss pointed out: adorable.

"One of board gaming's most prolific and revered designers, Reiner Knizia, is actively searching for iPhone devs to help bring his games to the iPhone, says industry site boardgamenews." Oooooooooh. That is all.

Rails plugin for intelligently searching within your application. Not a bad idea; will probably end up using this at some point.

"I would love to see more games that use Flower as a model, not in the copycat sense of being "flying games" or "games where you're the wind," but in the high-level approach that the production implies. Smaller, shorter, higher-fidelity, more focused, more sensate experiences that are affordable, accessible, and digestible. The primary obstacle to one designing a game with these principles in mind seem to be finding an engaging core sensation that fits the constraints. I can't wait to see the results that this challenge brings." Some sensible, and lucid, thoughts on Flower from Steve.

Jones has now seen "The President's Analyst" which is, by anyone's standards, a remarkable movie. Especially the bit in the cornfield. And the ending. Anyhow, he's screengrabbed loads of it on Flickr because it's just beautiful.

"…the Wii’s software stack is designed with little to no future proofing. There are basically zero provisions for any future updates; even obvious things like new storage devices or game patches. What’s worse is that this will affect the compatibility mode of any future Wii successor." Interesting analysis of what's going on inside a Wii, even if the architecture is a little limited.

"I smile. I didn't fool him in the slightest. But it doesn't matter. I didn't fall. Wax on the arm." Lovely.

"In the 14 months since [TeamFortress 2] shipped, the PC version of the game has seen 63 updates – “that’s the frequency you want to be providing updates to your customers,” [Newell] adds. “You want to say, ‘We’ll get back to you every week. The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”" Great write-up from Chris Remo of Gabe Newell's DICE talk.

"This is a sort of thorough, empirical, sociological study of art students at two British art schools at a very interesting moment, the late 1960s (a moment when, as the book says, anti-art became the approved art, bringing all sorts of paradoxes to the fore). I find it fascinating that such a subjective thing as developing an art practice can be studied so objectively, but then I find it amazing that art can be taught at all. The book shows the tutors and students circling each other with wariness, coolness, misunderstanding, despair, appreciation." Some great anecdotes and observation.

"Busker Du (dial-up) is a recording service for buskers through the telephone (preferably public payphones hidden in subway stations). Audio recorded will be posted to this audio-blog and made available to all who cherish lo-fi original music. Try it out at your favorite subway station or street corner." Dial-A-Song comes full circle.

"Poole – HAL 9000 is a fictional chess game in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, the astronaut Frank Poole is seen playing chess with the HAL 9000 supercomputer… The director Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, so unlike many chess scenes shown in other films, the position and analysis actually makes sense. The actual game seems to come from Roesch – Schlage, Hamburg 1910, a tournament game between two lesser-known masters."

Lovely demo – some interesting interfaces that feel quicker than current alternatives, as well as experimental ones that, whilst slower and clumsier, represent information a bit better. I mainly like the form-factor, though – but what's the unit cost? These things get a lot better the more you have.

"Something like: Trying to create a reading list that gives the best introduction to everything. This may change." Phil is trying to collect the Good Books in many fields. It's an interesting project, for sure; it'll also be interesting to see how it pans out.

I was a little excited from the ongoing Offworld love in, but Oli Welsh's review suddenly makes me insanely excited about Keita Takahashi's new plaything. Why is it that all the reasons for me wanting a £300 PS3 are £3 PSN titles?

"…the biggest consequence [of a universal micro-USB adaptor] will be the ease of transferring data/content from street service provider to consumer, and consumer to consumer… There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It's largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed."

"30 Second Hero is an action RPG which consists of really short battles that require no interaction, as players race against the clock to save the kingdom from an evil wizard's wrath. As indicated by the title, you only have thirty seconds to level up your character sufficiently for the final battle, although additional time can be bought from the castle at the cost of a hundred gold pieces per increment of ten seconds." Hectic; the entire early JRPG genre (FF1, et al) condensed into a minute-long rush. Grinding as poetry.

"I was convinced that it was a spoof. As if there’d be a genre called Donk. Everything is wrong about the video. The knowing subtitles over subtle Northern Accents. The presenter’s slight grin when he’s chatting to folk. The funnily named shops. Everything. There’s no way I’m falling for a prank like that. It reminds me heavily of the episode of Brass Eye where they whang on about Cake (the made up drug). And all the characters and the interviews look like they could be setups or clever edits." But no, it's real. Iain Tait discovers Donk.

"…with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end." Home of the Underdogs is no more; just gone, like that. It wasn't that it had the best games or the worst games, or that they were illegal, or free; it was history, and childhood, and the smell of cardboard and boot disks, all wrapped up in one giant cathedral to Good Old Games. Most things I played on my old DOS machine were there. A shame; I hope they're elsewhere. This is why we need proper game archives.

Tweaking a game five months after launch to make it both more playable, and also more realistic; understanding that realism is key to NHL09 fans, and delivering on that as an ongoing promise.

"Warcraft’s success has always been substantially due to the extraordinary physicality of Azeroth, to the real sense of land transversed, of caves discovered, and of secrets shared. Players old and new bemoan the endless trudging that low-level travel requires, but it’s crucial for binding you to the world." Yes. Despite QuestHelper, I'm always in awe of the new areas. I just wish more people were playing the game as slowly and badly as me. Another beautiful One More Go, and one that resonates a lot right now.

"AlterEgo is a Ruby implementation of the State pattern as described by the Gang of Four. It differs from other Ruby state machine libraries in that it focuses on providing polymorphic behavior based on object state. In effect, it makes it easy to give an object different “personalities” depending on the state it is in." Oh, that could be really handy.

Oh gosh this is brilliant.

"Simply stick your finger in the hole and a virtual representation appears on the screen. Then you can use your virtual finger to play all kinds of cool mini games… from swinging a panda to having a karate fight with a tiny little man." Um, wow. Although I'm always afraid of putting appendages in boxes I can't see inside, though.

I think they're wrong, you know. It's not theatre; it's protocol. Maybe people aren't used to the protocol; if yours is the first app they encounter, they'll think that it's OK to show what passwords are – and perhaps that it's OK to write them down elsewhere in plaintext. Applications have a degree of responsibility for users' interactions across the internet, and quirky and cute as this may be, it's just not the place to demonstrate your shining personality.

The Brian Dettmer is beautiful. Also: didn't realise the heart/cube cogs were paper, not wood.

"…it's another little example of the way the ipod/iphone is such an attention-demanding device. It doesn't orient to you, it orients to itself." Yes. This is a problem.

"The US auto industry is on the verge of imploding. People are losing their homes to foreclosure. And, on the off chance that you had the nerve to try to buy something, credit is almost impossible to come by. It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about working for free. Why? Because I think it is one of the fastest ways to make yourself a better photographer, whether you are a pro or an amateur."

"To the extent that the web is becoming truly ubiquitous, and involves increasingly multimodal paradigms of interaction, it seems appropriate to define a Web standard for representing emotion-related states, which can provide the required functionality." No, it does not seem appropriate. It seems bonkers.

Hey, I've been in that relationship too! These made me laugh a lot.

"bill. francis. louis – look here. help." Ah, the fun of the farm. It's all coming back to me now.

"Pretty sure I'm not the first person in the universe to come up with this idea, but I've yet to see another connect-the-dots tattoo." Beautiful.

"It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get." Paul Krugman, you are the best.

"The Theory of Interstellar Trade is a paper written in 1978 by economist Paul Krugman…. Krugman analyzed the question of 'how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer.'" Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, is officially awesome.

"The New York Times Magazine food issue had plenty of fun this weekend; Looks like photo editor Kathy Ryan gave photographer Martin Klimas a 22-caliber rifle and told him to embrace his anger. He decimated an ear of corn, an apple and a pumpkin so thoroughly that the editors could not decide on a favorite." Beautiful.

Strategy game that requires you to work within the boundaries of limited – but potentially powerful – AI, and act as a guiding "real intelligence" for your ships.

"Brownjohn had never worked with live action before, nor had his animation assistant Trevor Bond. Using techniques taught by László Moholy-Nagy, Brownjohn's team beamed light over three separate models; a belly dancer, a snake dancer and a model for close-ups." Short blogpost – with archive behind-the-scenes images – on creating the title sequence for Goldfinger.

"LittleBigPlanet lets [players] run wild, with unprecedented results, but it locks the majority out of the creative process, because it's time-consuming and simply not very enjoyable. We hoped it could do both those things. That it doesn't isn't the let-down it might have been, thanks to the untamed community of brilliant nutjobs that's already out there, appending their DIY masterpieces to this beautiful, mildly flawed, magnificently multiplayer platform game. We salute them, we salute Media Molecule for making it possible for them, and we salute Sony for its total commitment to this brave, hare-brained project. But mostly, we're just happy to see a flagship game for a modern system that's about running from left to right and jumping over things."

"…we're always being told art should disturb. Moore makes artists like the Chapmans look like the middle-class entertainers they are. He's a real force of imagination in a world that is full of fakes. If there was any justice this man would get the Turner Prize."

"Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference." Interesting – and technically fascinating – post on Wipeout HD's dynamic framebuffer, used to keep the framerate at a rock-solid 60fps at the expense of horizontal resolution

"Truth be told, I don't think in terms of absolute F/stops and shutter speeds. They are not what is important. It's the relationship between the different light levels that is important." This is why I love David Hobby: he talks about photography (in general) in the same words as me. Exposure isn't about numbers, it's about sliding scales.

Wow.

"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.

"Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.

Make Iced Tea!

"Now noisy makers can assemble and modify their own light controlled analog noise friend!" I want an analog noise friend.

"Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level — one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.

"With a recent project, we really started utilizing extensions with named_scope which is very powerful and cleaned up our code considerably." Some really nice examples of using named_scope effectively.

"Nintendo makes money with the hardware alone, which may be a superior business model." What, making profit on units rather than selling them at colossal loss is a *superior* business model? Who would have thought it!

Long thread of patched and hacked 8-bit and 16-bit ROMs, some bringing a vast amount of customisation.