Links & notes for this month

• • The Economics of Pinball « Cheap Talk
    "In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever... Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval." Good article on how the economics of pinball are wired into the machine.
    (tags: pinball economics games mechanics design balance replay )
  • Too Much Too Soon Free Plugins for Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express
    Lots of free FCE plugins, including some to rescale D90 footage and make it look a lot better.
    (tags: video d90 plugins free finalcutexpress )
  • Editing Nikon D90 Footage in Final Cut - Michael Mistretta
    "It turns out that Final Cut (both Express and Pro) don’t fully support the version of Motion JPEG that the D90 is using in AVI files, so the footage needs to be converted to Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple ProRes before editing." This makes things much better.
    (tags: nikon d90 video finalcutexpress howto )
• • Idle Thumbs: A Weekly Video Game Podcast
    "As Hecker suggested, though, that crucial consideration of the "why" of game development -- along with related questions like "What are you trying to say to people?" or "What influenced this?" or "Are you trying to say anything at all?" -- seems to be less important in this medium than it is elsewhere. That's understandable, since "fun" can be pursued for its own benefit, and to great and impressive effect. Surely we've got that covered by this point, though, and there's bandwidth for more." Chris Remo thinks out loud for a bit.
    (tags: games intent design fun meaning chrisremo )
• • The Game of Love by Marie Mutsuki Mockett - The Morning News
    "On the last day of tutoring, I asked my 15-year-old student if he knew that he had a chance to woo and win Bastila. “Really?” He thought he’d known everything about the game, but the dialogue option never registered as flirtation. His face, usually so focused with youthful liveliness, grew wary. He frowned and blinked. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his beloved game would contain something so foreign. So adult. " Marie Mutsuki Mockett - what a name! - writes about KOTOR, Carth Onassi, and a little bit of magic.
    (tags: games kotor romance bioware writing )
  • Tutorial Condescending | Hardcasual
    "The alien tripods are decimating the city with ion cannons. Wild one-eyed dog-pigs with irritatingly high voices are roaming the streets, mutilating the populace with their fire breath, doing their best to keep their pet radioactive zombies in check. Meanwhile, you – the only one who can do anything to stop this genocide – are in stuck in a medical pod, being instructed by some asshole lab assistant on how to move your head up and down." Hardcasual don't like tutorials.
    (tags: games tutorials instructions hardcasual )
• • tobi's delayed_job at master - GitHub
    "Delayed_job (or DJ) encapsulates the common pattern of asynchronously executing longer tasks in the background." Extracted from Shopify, and looks very, very useful; filed away for another day.
    (tags: rails background queue ruby plugin delayedjob )
• • Creating an audiogeography from walks through the silence at Alper.nl
    "We would then take the data generated from these walks and plot them into a computer representation of the area and generate visualisations from that. Building an audiogeography superimposed on the physical landscape with the sound levels as experienced by somebody who would walk through the area." Some nice work from Alper and Kars.
    (tags: processing art visualisation sound silence rendering geography maps )
  • Brad Sucks Rock Band Preview « Brad Sucks
    Brad Sucks has converted his own material to Rock Band tracks in Rock Band Studio, and will soon be selling them straight to your 360. Harmonix really are bringing something to the game here - amateur/unsigned musicians can now use Rock Band to sell music (with appropriate notecharts, obviously), in the same way they started to use MySpace as promotion a few years ago. Awesome.
    (tags: music future media rockband rockbandstudio )
• • STM8S-Discovery: Microcontrollers reach a new low - Hack a Day
    "The ST-LINK USB programmer/debugger comes attached, but it’s easy to crack one off and use this for future STMicro-compatible projects; clearly a plan of giving away the razor and selling the blades." $7 for a microcontroller which also has the usb connector/debugger attached; snap it off when you're done.
    (tags: microcontroller programming electronics hardware )
• • Digital economy bill: A punishing future | Comment is free | The Guardian
    "It boils Digital Britain down to three Ms – media, music and movies – myopically ignoring the pioneers of new technology, and ? showing a blind spot for all creativity outside the so-called creative industries... Instead of empowering digital Britons, the bill follows the lead of music and movie corporations, who already apply a presumption of guilt to their customers. Instead of treating the web as a platform of possibilities, it recasts it as a tool for mass theft." Excellent, excellent leader from the Guardian on the frankly scandalous digital economy bill.
    (tags: uk politics government threestrikes digitaleconomy economy copyright )
  • Fullbright: The middle child at peace
    "...maybe this is the best of both worlds. An audience that, having crossed the barriers to entry, is by its nature more invested in our work; a public profile by which we have the means to occasionally reach into the mass consciousness, but which affords us the freedom to continue experimenting with subject, form, and style; an industry which is truly international; which is capable of producing both multi-million dollar blockbusters and single-creator labors of love (and releasing both on the same platform); which manages to be neither too big nor too small, and is the more vital, unique and exhilarating for it. We are a medium for us, and while there are more and more of us every day, we'll never be for everyone. In a way, that's beautiful." I think Steve's about right.
    (tags: games criticism comics culture stevegaynor )
• • I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome, by Tom Francis
    "In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it. By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (”stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go." Tom Francis gets the gnome achievement in L4D2, and lives to tell the tale.
    (tags: games achievements writing tomfrancis l4d2 )
• • Blackbeard Blog - 2. The Process Is The Story
    "...we’re still in talking-dog territory here, where the fact of socialness matters more than the outcome. This won’t last forever, of course. It probably won’t last out 2010." Tom is sharing some notes from that "140 Characters" conference; he's got some sharp insight/ideas.
    (tags: marketing twitter tomewing analysis 140conf )
• • Four Walks
    "I did a set of four walks in Austria; two long ones, two short ones. I did some "daystreaming" where using bits of technology I was updating my location, status and pictures as I walked." Ambient information gathering, whilst taking in the outdoors, and all for charity. Lovely.
    (tags: walking streaming ambient data hiking christhorpe )
  • Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog » Blog Archive » Finally, Geoencoding in Lightroom! Announcing my GPS-Support Plugin
    And it just worked first time. Awesome!
    (tags: lightroom gps geotagging photography plugin )
  • SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
    "The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Eco on lists.
    (tags: lists cataloguing umbertoeco interview )
  • Learning Vehicle | Edge Online
    "Today, the UK government's Department For Transport unveils a new browser-based MMOG, created by New York-based developer Area/Code. Designed for early teenagers to learn principles of traffic safety, it's probably the largest 'serious games' project ever to be created for the UK. Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body... We spoke to Lantz, Slavin and Simon Williams, who led the project at Carat, the Department For Transport's media agency, about what Code Of Everand is, how they pulled it off, and why they think it could prove that games can be a powerful platform for learning." Edge interview.
    (tags: edge games areacode franklantz kevinslavin online mmo transport uk )
  • Design With A Purpose, An Interview With Ralph Eggleston
    Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.
    (tags: pixar design illustration art animation films walle interview colour ralpheggleston )