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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.)
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"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.
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"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.
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"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.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R./H.C.S.D.
21 January 2011
Alone For All Seasons is Matt Sakey’s chapter on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise from Well Played 2.0 – a book of criticism, one game per chapter. It’s now available to read online. It’s a cracking read; despite having read a large chunk of the writing about the game, I’ve not played any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise myself.
In the article, Sakey comments on the titular acronym, branded onto the player-character (and, indeed, other Stalkers) by the Zone itself:
It brainwashes or kills anyone who comes close to discovering it, marking the corpses as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s – scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, killers, explorers, and robbers. The tattoo is a scarlet letter left behind on unwelcome intruders as a warning to the others.
Scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, killers, explorers, and robbers.
A categorisation that immediately takes me back to Richard Bartle’s Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds and his four MUD player types (Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers, Killers).
There’s an interesting subtly to its divisions. Play-as-trespass, for instance, is an immediately interesting one: exploration as transgression rather than just for its own sake. Scavenger and Robber play out in a similar axis: hunting for treasure that’s there to be taken, against taking what you find regardless of whether it’s treasure. There’s not much room for Socialisers in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe, though; that role is taken by the Loner.
The Zone knows it’s being played with, and marks out its prey as exactly what it knows them to be: players.