"Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither. It’s important that we make the distinction between the two undertakings because, amidst all this confusion, we’re losing sight of the question of what would happen if we really did apply the deeper powers of game design to more everyday things – if we really did gamify them – and that question is a fascinating, exciting and troubling one. I really hope we get a chance to explore it properly." Margaret, on good form, as ever.

Or, more accurately: Dave Mazzuchelli's adaptation of City of Glass is now available in the PSP comic store. A totally bizarre sentence in many ways, but know this – it's brilliant, and if you actually read comics on your PSP, thoroughly recommended

""Future of Music (2010)" is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn't matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life."

Lovely.

"We access that history with tools that were, almost entirely, the props of science fiction my parents might have encountered – if they read it. My phone is my sonic screwdriver, the internet my TARDIS; these are the tools with which I unlock and manipulate time."

"I spent fifty-nine pounds and seventeen pence on Fifa 09′s Ultimate Team mode. That is painful to admit, and I had to check it three times. £59.17."

"One succeeds because it leverages the player's motivated, explorative, self-driven experience; the other fails because it relies on a hackneyed, disjointed "epic" plotting (told in 3 separate plot-lines via cutscenes) with incongruous settings and 2-dimensional characters. One succeeds because its formal systems directly feed the player's connection to the world and characters; the other fails because its formal systems bear no discernible relationship to the stories the game wants to tell." This is strong stuff from Michael; I am increasingly fed up of the focus on (poorly-told) stories in games.

"Know that there are no "accidents" in this game design. Everything you notice about the game, and every subtle interaction that you experience, is intentionally packed with meaning." (Gravitation, still, being my favourite of Rohrer's games, I think).

"Crucially, Goodrich entreats the public to note the following: "this change should not directly affect gamers, as it does not fundamentally alter the gameplay." This one statement should cause considerable distress, as it suggests a troubling conclusion about Medal of Honor as a work of public speech.<br />
<br />
To wit: it suggests that the Taliban never had any meaningful representation in the game anyway. If a historically, culturally, and geographically specific enemy can simply be recast in the generic cloth of "opposition," then why was it was called "Taliban" in the first place?<br />
<br />
And if the Afghan war in which the new Medal of Honor is set was one explicitly meant to drive the Taliban from their strongholds in Afghanistan, why should it matter that the game is set in that nation in the present day at all? In short, how was this Medal of Honor title meant to be a game about this war in particular?" This is a marvellous, critical piece of writing from Bogost.

Nice post on Awk basics – most of which I knew, but the examples are still great, especially those involving variables. The links out to the Hacker News and Reddit threads are also full of good stuff.

Seriously considering this for the new machine.

The talk I gave at the Media Festival Arts is now online. It's about making data human-scale, and why Twitter bots are a kind of synecdoche.

"…in honor of Canabalt's first birthday (back on September 1st), why not write a guided tour of how everything works instead?" Lots of good tidbits on here; the stuff on hitboxes is particularly well observed and explained.

This is all great.

I walked 4.5km down the A10, stopping every 200m or so to ask 10 unsuspecting passers by … "Excuse me, what area is this?" This is what I was told.

"We’ve just launched a project in collaboration with biochemist/photographer, Linden Gledhill for Canon’s PIXMA colour printer range.  The project features surreal ‘sound sculptures’ made of dancing droplets of paint captured in extreme detail as they react to sound waves." Just beautiful.

This is very good: well explained, the right way around of doing things, and some neat tricks to boot.