Yes, it's advertising, but that's really, really, really clever. Nicely done.

"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.

I've linked to a single photo, because it makes me think: what it must be, to be taking photographs for Science, millions of miles away via radiowaves, and to have them not only be useful, but to turn out as beautiful as this one. How wonderful to know that the universe is as beautiful as the world, and that even in the name of research, we can take such beautiful pictures.

"82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km."

"Miegakure is a platform game where you explore the fourth dimension to solve puzzles. There is no trick; the game is entirely designed and programmed in 4D. Because humans can only see and move along three spatial dimensions, pressing a button allows to "swap" one regular dimension with the fourth, invisible dimension. Armed with this, the protagonist can see inside closed objects, walk through walls, move objects from one dimension to another, hide under 3D shadows of 4D objects, and more. " You read right. Four spatial dimensions. Now: how can I play it?

"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." Bill Safire's speech for Richard Nixon, on the event Armstrong and Aldrin were marooned. A glimpse of alternate history.

"I hate the way I’m expected to give up trying to open you when I see the words “this door has been locked from the other side” or “this door opens elsewhere”, as though they’re a command from God himself."

"Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model." This kind of proscription (or encouragement) of behaviour is interesting, and I think there are a variety of ways to do it "sensibly". And: how did you expand the group of "people who fit its prescribed social model"? Small changes of behaviour, amongst larger groups, are much, much more interesting.

"Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down." Sad, really.

It's the hip-hop-songs-as-charts meme, but about being a PC gamer. Moderate chuckles abound.

Contains photographs of a PIG in TINY WELLINGTON BOOTS.

"The problem with all this is that we're asking the wrong question. The “are games art?” question is boring…
The interesting question, to me, is what /kind/ of art games are. That is, we should be asking ourselves what kind of formal dynamics and pleasures are inherent in the medium, and be able to identify when these formal capacities are used well." Sensible, rationally thought out, and also a reminder as to /why/ Kane is used as a benchmark. "Command of formal capacities" is an important phrase.

"Clearly we had not been invested enough in the narrative."

Francis has gained his own clothing line, and I need this shirt like a red wizard needs food.

"I've always marvelled at the idea of a $25m game needing $35m of marketing. Doesn't that feel so wrong and weird? I'd make two $25m games, spend $8m on indies doing crazy new things, and have $2m left over for some nu-style publicity. Or better still, spend $60m across 60 indies full stop." Lots of good things in Alice's compainon to Matt's posts, but especially this; the constant shyness to 'spend less on more stuff' from the games "industry" always befuddles me.

Lots of comics neatly surmising the plots of various Metal Gears; "Let's Destroy The Shagohod" is pretty spot-on, start to finish, and full of Giant Spoilers, obviously.

"As I tried to unravel Braid’s interstitial text I realized that solving the puzzles and understanding the text required very similar approaches. Their concealed machinations and thematic ambiguities are teased out using the same mental processes, and are part of the same overarching search for meaning. In a way, I was “reading” everything in the game. It’s not the unification of narrative and gameplay that we’ve come to expect, but it’s a refreshing and effective one." Dan Bruno has an interesting perspective on Braid; not sure I agree with it entirely, but the feelings he describes are certainly familiar.

So I'm going to be writing the odd thing for Offworld from time to time, and this is my first post, on a nice post from Steve Gaynor about architecutre, and leading players through stories with architecture alone. More to come, pop-pickers.

"70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day."

"bringing japanese arcades to you" – a blog about the Japanese Arcade scene. Videos, new releases, and lots of tournament videos. Not bad!

Need to finish watching this, but: for all you can ridicule this, a lot of it isn't half bad; the two modes of videophone (share face/share document) are interesting, if only for how useful the latter is. Also, interesting to see how futurism was represented on film at one point.

"The Bryant Collection is an interactive anthology: a collection of ’story worlds’ by Laura Bryant. They were found at a yard sale in an old strongbox. Five pieces of interactive fiction written by someone who never used a computer. It is interactive fiction, which means that the player types commands in text, and the game responds with text descriptions." This may or may not be true, but the games are very much real.

"A decade or two ago I spent some days in a “study” in an old Oxford college: bed, desk, lamp, and a window with a view of the quadrangle; nothing else. It made an impression that hasn’t faded. Among other things, I made insane, immense progress on a difficult piece of writing at the front of my to-do list. Here’s a prediction: Geek fashion in particular and intellectual fashion in general will swing hard over: from cluttered to ascetic, from high to low entropy, from library to monastery." A few thoughts from Tim Bray – not all of which I agree with – on the changing geek aesthetic.

David Hellman releases hi-res assets of all the Braid artwork. It is beautiful, and am thinking about how best to use some of it on my desktop.

'London police are now deleting tourists' photos because "photographing anything to do with transport is strictly forbidden."' Oh god.

"Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots."

"[within the games industry]… the creativity-medium-invention and attitude-practice-deconstruction models often hold no water. Rather, there is only importance placed upon the “talent-meiter-immitation” model that is still in practice in the industry today." An interesting analysis of the nature of education (as it relates to the games industry) and models of learning. I have often lamented the depressing state of how career progression in the industry works, and this article helps quantifies it.

A thoughful post (as ever) from the L4D team detailing some of the balancing and planning that's gone into the Survival Mode experience. Looking forward to firing this up next week…

"The genre of the palindrome, playful and ludic as it is, nonetheless has a strong implication of violence. In the work of its foremost practitioners, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as some of their postmodern successors, the palindrome is closely linked to death, cannibalism, beheading, and murder."

Tom Francis posits an alternate ending to Bioshock, that makes sense of the Vita-Chambers switcheroo, gives the player the agency they've craved, fixes some of the issues with the original ending, and asks you kindly to DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO.

"anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. " Yes.