"Nethack does what computers do best – what computers were invented for. It hands you a symbolic representation of something, and lets you interact with it. The symbols are utterly mundane … but the interaction is extraordinarily complicated. Interacting with the game of Nethack can be glorious, frustrating, hilarious, and satisfying. Like any great game, it's even fun to watch and talk about when played by others. There are probably more web pages of people telling their Nethack war stories than there are pages discussing the game itself.<br />
<br />
This is one of those pages. I'm writing this because, after twenty years of playing, I finally completed the game." It's quite a tale, and full of glimpses of secrets I never discovered. Always more of a rogue man.

"Need something to read? Enjoy these selections from among the most frequently bookmarked articles on Instapaper."

"I see Valve Software today holding the same position in the overall media landscape that Marvel Comics occupied in the early-mid 1960s. In both cases, we have two experienced studios, neither the mainstream-recognized giants of their fields, who made an unusual decision: they chose to spend the creative capital gained from prior commercial success to quietly revolutionize their respective medium's dominant genres, rather than take the safer path of grinding out more derivative sameness."

Ben Zeigler's notes on Bunge's Jaime Griesemer's talk at GDC, all about balancing. Sample quotation: "It can be tricky to balance, because designers can misinterpret competence (getting good at a weapon) with the weapon being balanced. We CANNOT use our intuition at this stage because it will lie to us. Changes will have to be done in larger batches, and we need to avoid bias effects." Really, the whole thing is jampacked with interesting stuff (not all of which I agree with, but most of it is very good indeed).

"Just because you give a game a theme, doesn’t make a game about that thing. … A game’s mechanics give it meaning. It fundamentally does not matter how you theme a game, the mechanics ultimately determine what a game is about." Soren Johnson is smart.

"XKCD minus XKCD is a site dedicated to removing XKCD from the XKCD comic strips, with apologies to Garfield Minus Garfield." Very droll.

"Harrison's concept–which works, by the way–uses the body as a sort of echo chamber. Which is to say, when the user taps a particular part of their body, a sensor worn around the upper arm can tell if the tap-point was at a particular spot on the forearm or on one of the individual fingertips, by assessing the vibrations sent throughout the body by the tap." The detection of tap location is remarkable – a single sensor, that picks out location based on the characteristics of the body's reverberation from the tap.

EA Sports Active 2.0: for iPhone, Wii, and PS3 (along with centralized online hub). That's a really, really interesting lineup of products – especially considering that there's going to be peripherals for all of them – and slices through a casual-games/casual-exercise market.

"The Lego Step-sequencer is 3 channels 8 steps sequencer. The different coloured Lego pieces each have their own sound. Connecting the Lego three-dimensional makes complex sound. This is building sound more than playing sound."

"The Passenger preference pane is a preference pane for Mac OS X, it enables you to configure a Rails or Rack application in a matter of seconds." It does. It's very good.

"As far as sponge puddings go, it won’t win any awards. It certainly doesn’t have the artery clogging density of a steamed suet based effort or the deft lightness of a well worked cake. But what it lacks in technique, it more than makes up for in brevity." Alex's microwaved sponge pudding looks fun.

"…several months ago, for no particular reason that I remember, I thought it would be silly and possibly fun to play all the Final Fantasy games." A blog to chronicle that journey, from I through to XIII, excluding XI (sensibly) and including X-2 and Crisis Core. Blimey. Not my cup of tea, but the endeavour alone is worth a bookmark.

"I started with Valentina Tereshkova in January 2009 thinking if I drew one every week I'd finish the series around the end of the year. See how well that worked out." I like Phil Bond's art already, but this set of portraits of female astronauts is just lovely.

Six-panel comics truncating movies in their entirety. Although the Zombieland one won, I love the American Psycho one.

"…our top three franchises, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and World of Warcraft, accounted for approximately 68% of our net revenues for the year ended December 31, 2009. We expect that a limited number of popular franchises will increasingly produce a disproportionately high percentage of our revenues and profits." How depressing. Bill Harris delves into Activision's latest financial report and finds more rational behind the crazy Infinity Ward shenanigans of the past week.