[this is good]. I particularly liked "one damn thing after another", because yes, that's how I tend to think about these things, wrestling an essay into something that makes sense as a told narrative.

"If we forget the needs bit then we're just talking about users, which easily elides into audiences, which everyone takes to mean target audiences – which is a whole different kettle of ball games." Yeah, sometimes I forget about that when we – the wider we – talk about users.

"There doesn't have to be a binary choice between hiding networks and revealing networks to be evil and hegemonic. We could decide to materialise technology infrastructure and demonstrate that it is marvellous, powerful and useful. Maybe that would encourage people to try and make it their own things with it rather than just run away."

This is super-good – not just on ARGs, which aren't necessarily flavour of the month, but on designing difficult puzzles for a large number of people to solve, and how not to be surprised by how fast groups are at solving things when they have the network. Gating the experience with slow tasks – MD5 brute-forcing, for instance, is one nice idea; I also really like Adam's points about making sure players know precisely what is in-universe and what isn't, so there's never a question of whether something is right or not; just like a good cryptic crossword.

"If we were managing a brand would we have been so brutal and focused with these things? Probably not. It would have been someone's job to think of these as valuable brand assets and argue for their preservation. For some reason, as soon as you describe something as a brand all this fake science marketing mysticism gets invoked and paralysing decisions get made." Russell on GOV.UK

Hello Lamppost ends up on the Creative Review blog.

"Millions and millions and millions of people also love Gregory's Girl and OMD and Brookside and Underworld and Evelyn Glennie and the shipping forecast and that is deeply joyous and important." Yep, that.

"It’s the symptom of the algorithm. It’s what comes out of the digital-political-economy of cultures that live by networks and the machinary (soft/hard/hashtag-y) that underpin it all. All this #newaesthtic #ooo #futureofproduction stuff is the excess. The unexpected, unplanned for result. It’s the things that happen without one self-consciously *going after* #newaesthetic / object-oriented ontological / future of network connected things sensibilities." A calm, rational, open-ended commentary from Julian. I liked this point.

"We'll only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new, when we have a sense of history about what we're making." Better keep on making, then. (This is good. Also: well done Phil. It's important to say well done, and this is a lot of effort, and it's been brilliant. Finishing in May! Gosh).

"…one point I wanted to make, to all those agencies that have decided that making products is the future. That's a laudable and intelligent aim, but it took five years for BERG to go from here to here. And they're really good. They had to be focused and ambitious, working really hard. This isn't stuff you can just chuck out the back of a creative technology department  Just a thought." Yeah, there is that.

"Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper." Little Printer sees the light of day. So, so excited to finally see it in the world; can't wait to see it in other homes. (And: beautiful work on the design – industrial, brand, web, the whole package).

"I suspect 'creating something personal, even of moderate quality' and letting people share it is going to be one of the business models of the next century. And one of the social movements. Which will happen if we can squeeze the convenience and scale of the internet into other places."

"People make maps in Team Fortress 2 specifically for grinding achievements. Bleak, joyless rooms of endlessly spawning bots and resupply crates, where people don’t play the game, they game it. But in one of these, achievement_all_v4, the author’s added a surprise. A violent, horrific, hilarious surprise of biblical proportions." A good community polices itself. This is hilarious.

"My main point brings me back to Pretending Apps. Because there are lots of other things you can steal from games, many other aspects of gaming that people find appealing and some of them might be more easily and usefully extracted." Yup. This was one of my main beefs with the whole "let's make everything playful/gamey!" trend that kicked off a few years ago: "game-y" was associated with "having points", and really, that's not what makes a game at all. (Other things that make a game: pretending, as Russell mentions, and visible mechanics, as I think I have to write about soon).

"There seems to be some sort of consensus that the highest form of play is fully immersive, interactive live theatre. Well not for me. The rhetoric of these things is often about people making their own choices, being free to act, creating their own narrative, etc, etc. And I always end up feeling like a piece, a pawn." Totally; not for me, either, though I'm not totally into "Social Toys" either – but Russell's points are perfectly valid and sensible. (I do like theatre, though). Probably ought to write more than a few hundred characters on this.

Solid illustration comedy gold, mainly from the 70s and 80s.

"So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It's a little bit collapsist; let's wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls – I'd love to see what we'd come up with then."

"Stacey is an easier way to create a portfolio site. No database setup or installation files, simply drop the application on a server and it runs. Your content is managed by creating folders and editing text files. No login screens, no ‘cms’." Elegant – perhaps even more so than some of the stripped-down Ruby static-site management tools I've seen.