Yuri Suzuki and Mark McKeague have a new design/invention firm. I like that they emphatically describe themselves as making "machines" (along with products and experiences). (Found because of Ototo).

"If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.

"Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions." Beautiful, notably "I wish I were the Moon"

"In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"– the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts." Fantastic piece from Steve Gaynor, which touches on some notions of the death of the designer – namely, that the designer *is* inherently present in games; they embody themselves in mechanics, and games that downplay logical mechanics that players can reverse-engineer do themselves a disservice.

I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive… but "Height" is really lovely.

"After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent — the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules. This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method."

Jason Kottke republishes the supposed rules that Chuck Jones and other Road Runner animators stuck to whilst making their cartoons. Perhaps a little apocraphyl, but I like the idea of rules for things that aren't games.

"Merb’s routing shiznits needs some serious documentation love. Whilst I have a shot at getting some proper docpatches together here’s an overview of how to use routing in Merb 0.5." Thank god for that – was finding Merb's docs a little patchy in places.

Cannot believe I only just discovered this: it's a sleeping bag with arms and legs. Incredible.

"…it’s my feeling that experiences can’t really be designed. You can only provide the resources for people to have an experience; then it’s the people (users) themselves who create the experience." Dan Saffer hits the nail on the head at his new studio's blog. Can't wait to see what comes out of Kicker.

"This leads into something else that felt very clear after the conference; the need to look outside of what we already know. If, as Matt Jones, posited, execution is more important than ideas, we’re going to need an understanding that is based on people who are not us, and that understanding is going to have to incorporate all the richness of what they know, how they model their worlds, and how they model their interactions with the world around them." Looking forward to more from Alex on dConstruct

"The Box is an ambitious and unique year-long project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world." Awesome. What's better is that it's a working container, which means it's not significantly contributing in a negative way to environmental damage any more than other containers. Could be interesting.