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"Demeter quit his bank job two months ago and has launched a company, Demiforce, to develop more electronic games. Now he has a salaried staff, five games in development and two coming out by Christmas, including a spinoff to "Trism" called "Trismology."" I hope his success continues; scaling up always seems scary, but Trism was – and is – superb.
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"The conundrum is that no path, no vision of progress – technological, social, moral – will be plausible today if it does not include the complexity of costs, yet it will not be desirable if it does. That makes our society blind." Some good, if dense, Kevin Kelly.
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"I wrote a script that lets you see what this money could buy if we weren’t throwing it at second-rate comedians or third-rate bankers. What if we spent it on schools, or teachers, or wispas instead? My script lets you see that by altering the text of Guardian articles as you browse." Ben's hack was brilliant in its simplicity, and really does change the way you read the news.
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"Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods." Location-based game that forces you to travel out of your normal areas, and potentially explore transport networks. Also: not designed around specific devices, just laptop+wifi.
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"Fallout 3 is a tribute to intent. It's not a rallying cry for any cause or even a cautionary tale about the hypothetical horrors of nuclear holocaust. It's a statement on the worthlessness of inaction. It's about not staying in the vault."
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"Far Cry 2 doesn’t so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player as it does to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, letting the player loose in that world." One of my favourite pieces of writing on FC2, if only because it captures the nature of the game so well.
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"Oddly, although Left 4 Dead only comes out today, Gamestop.com has already switched from their previews to reviews. You'd think that wouldn't be enough time for their users to appraise the game. You would even think that they'd want to play the full game before trumpeting their thoughts and throwing around phrases like "game of the year." You would be wrong." Mitch is harsh but fair.
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"See what's been discovered by the Wasteland inhabitants!" Collaborative slippymap of what people are finding in the DC Wasteland in Fallout 3.
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"Images don't automatically attach to emails. I hope you and your husband can work things out though." Oh dear.
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"For all the prioritizing and severitizing (which costs a lot of time during bug input) the best method of bug sorting was human communication." Yes. Too much time has been lost in too many custom installs of JIRA.
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"Hi everybody, I'm Brandon, and this is Offworld." Oh! This could be good.
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"For even if all it does is sit ceremonially on your mantelpiece next to a bar of Toblerone and a signed photo of Swiss Toni as a tribute to all things Swiss, you will have achieved greatness, my son." Best. Product. Description. Ever. (This feels like an April fool, but apparently no).
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Oh jesus it's a Watchmen videogame and it's been converted… into a free-roaming beat-em-up. Rorschach in Streets of Rage 3D. Shoot me now.
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Yes.
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"ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors ("Buddy's Bug Hunt/1935") to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence. For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services featured in Warner Bros. cartoons (made by the original studio from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog."
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"…while almost all of the game’s residents are free to go as they please, heading off to new towns and lives on a whim, once you step off the bus and choose a house in which to settle, you’re here for good…. you are the local constant, the hick who’s never left its borders and there is some comfort in the knowledge that the places the other animals leave for can never be known by you." Simon's original version of his Wii Animal Crossing review; some lovely analysis of the series to date.
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"Uses the Flickr shapefiles to show you where the world thinks its neighbours are." Damnit I wish Tom would stop magicking up awesomeness all the time.
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…and bloody frustrating too.
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Clive Thompson on how Mirror's Edge "hacks" your proprioception: "it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic."
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"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.
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"Some people love this kind of aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love. This is rubbish… There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information." Phil talks about some problems he's been trying to solve with dashboard displays.
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"A magnificent, huge orca-like beast, swimming calmly through the vast ocean beneath my smoke-belching craft. She was a beauty. And she instantly became my Moby Dick. “I’m coming back for you”, I thought. Big Shirl is a reason to reach level 80. I have no doubt the grind will get to me before too long, or that the thought of repeatedly running the same dungeons or battlegrounds come level 80 will turn me off all over again… In these early days though, before everyone in it knows everything, it’s an explorer’s paradise. That’s why I play MMOs." A nice, thoughtful article from a first look at WotLK from Alec Meer
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"Wow. Ever get the feeling you've been thrown for a loop? I did just that, when I worked out that GSW commenter and erudite game blogger, PixelVixen707, appears to be not just a smart game blogger, but a fictitious front for some kind of damn weird ARG/online story." Down the rabbit hole we go, again.
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"SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people… This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer. I love the pivot."
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"At the start it seemed reasonable to think that Mirror's Edge could stand entirely on the merits of its brilliant core concept, and not need to include extraneous and negligibly attractive features to appeal to as many people as possible. But, no, this is the video game business." This is the stuff that's scaring me most about Mirror's Edge.
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"…in recent years, [the stage has] moved away from those practices. Today, we better understand the importance of offering kids the very best we can do. They are no different from the rest of us. They respond positively to quality, and they quickly grow bored and restless with mediocrity… We might consider a similar approach to video games. If we want our kids – heck, if we want all of us – to enjoy quality games, we must pay attention to and promote those games that deliver quality."
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From Duncan Harris; postcards from post-apocalyptic DC.
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Course notes from Stanford's Cocoa programming course.
What I got up to on Thursday
16 November 2008
Last Thursday and Friday, I was very lucky to be invited to the Guardian’s first internal hack day. Whilst it was primarily an internal event, they also invited along a few of their friends to see what we could do with some of their information.
It was a really stimulating two days – exciting to see just what the Guardian is doing with their data and their journalism, and the ways they’re trying to make it more open. A particular highlight was seeing Simon Rogers explain the process of researching infographics and data-sourced news articles, and offering his talent for hunting down data to anyone who needed it; he provided a lot of hackers with useful sets of information that were only ever going to be found through a series of tactical phonecalls. For those of us not requesting data to order, the Guardian’s new full-text RSS feeds came in very, very handy, let me tell you.
It was also great to meet some of their technical staff. Obviously, the Guardian developer programme is in safe hands with Matt McAllister, and I’ve known Simon for a while, but it was great to meet lots more of their developers, client-side team and QAs; they were, to a person, lovely and talented, and it’s clear that the Guardian has a deep culture of quality.
I orginally wanted to build something along the lines of CelebDAQ but for journalists. The idea would be that you invested in journalists and made returns based on the column inches they filed; the goal was to highlight a lot of the high-volume content on the Guardian website that goes unnoticed, whilst making the more prolific and “celebrity” writers like Charlie Brooker expensive commodities.
Unfortunately, it soon become clear that the volume of scraping and data-parsing I would have to undertake would take far longer than I planned, and I wasn’t planning on staying up all night.
So I scaled down my thinking, and instead of undertaking “real programming” I started thinking instead about “neat hacks”, and the result was this:
In a nutshell, it parses the Guardian’s publicly available politics RSS feed, counts the number of names of Labour MPs and of Conservative MPs (not to mention the words “Labour”, “Tory”, and “Conservative”), and then works out the “swing” of the page. That data is then sent over serial to an Arduino, which outputs the result on a little bargraph.
It wasn’t the hardest of challenges, but I did get to write some Wiring and learn how to send serial data from Ruby, and I had a lot of fun poking electronic circuits. I was fortunate enough to win a subscription to Make for my troubles, as were the other team of plucky hardware hackers in the room – a lovely surprise to end the two days on.
37 hacks were submitted overall – impressive given the short period of time and how busy everybody was – and they ranged from the entertaining to the remarkably useful, from the thought-provoking to the empowering. Jemima Kiss has written up a few of the stand-out hacks in her Guardian blogpost on the event. It was great to see what such a talented – and multi-skilled – room could produce in under 24 hours, and I hope that the internal team at the Guardian enjoyed it as much as I did.
Many thanks to everyone who organised the event, and I look forward to seeing what the Guardian do with their data – and their great hacking – on a larger scale.
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"The touch screen method of controlling the ship brings this fact out into startling clarity and suddenly your perspective shifts like you've been staring at a poster of messy green and red ducks in a row and suddenly you can see the fricking sailboat for the love of god, YES! FINALLY!" Simon explains why rRootage on the iPhone makes sense. (It does: your finger both controls the ship and obscures it, so your finger _becomes_ the ship, and now you're just guiding your finger through the bullets).
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Five different apps that share data between your Mac and your iPhone in a variety of potentially useful ways.
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Jolly good interview with Stephen Cakebread and Craig Howard from Bizarre Creations about the evolution of the Geometry Wars series. In a nutshell: simple games, simply made, and then honed to perfection, or as near as you can get. It's the honing that's important
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"Somewhere, across whatever barriers stand between, is an other." Jason Rohrer's new game is for two.
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"A 200-year-old church building has disappeared from a village in central Russia, officials from the Russian Orthodox Church say… It was intact in July but some time in early October thieves made off with it brick by brick." Um.
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"IE 6 is a riskier proposition, but can show improved image resizing when the AlphaImageLoader CSS filter is applied, the same filter commonly used for properly displaying PNGs with alpha transparency." Oh, that's interesting.
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Mirror's Edge 2D flash game – which look, by all accounts, to be an official spin-off. Can't wait to see the full version; it's a very impressive little game.
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"You want to know what I think? I'll tell you what I think. Here's what I think: Java Java Java is is is too too too damn damn damn verbose verbose verbose. That's what I think. And I'm sticking to it. So there."
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"The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote." This one is particularly good.
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Wonderful, wonderful, stop-motion trailer for a Megaman 9 built out of the real world. Hypnotic, and lovely.
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"Director Ridley Scott will helm the bizarre big screen adaptation of popular boardgame Monopoly… According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ridley will give the Monopoly movie a futuristic edge akin to his 1982 epic Blade Runner… The unlikely subject matter is just one in a line of Hasbro games to get big screen makeovers as part of an exclusive pairing with Universal Studios… Transformers filmmaker Michael Bay is producing a Ouija Board feature, while a film version of beloved classic Battleship is also in development." I know what "development" means, but still, this is the craziest games-to-film news I've seen for quite some time. Hollywood is strange.
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"there's a new form of graffiti in town, and it's extremely pleasant. so pleasant that i can't imagine even the harshest critics of regular graffiti getting wound up. i mean, who in their right mind would come face to face with a sweater-wearing tree and do anything but smile?"
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"…there are dozens of talented programmers who live outside of Seattle who can’t participate in our weekly chats. This makes me sad. So I decided to share some of our graphics as part of a brand spanking new game prototyping challenge. Free graphics + new game prototyping challenge = Happiness." Lovely idea. Wouldn't mind trying this at some point.
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"There are many reasons one might want to book a commerical space flight, but fleeing Earth just to reclaim rights on a crappy thrash metal midi track you made in Guitar Hero: World Tour when you were 16 and had way too much free time is never going to be one of them." EULA fail.
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It's something a bit like the first 2-3 minutes of Mirror's Edge. But in LittleBigPlanet. People are great.
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"I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user […], I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library." Some lovely work by Dan Hill.
Surplus
12 November 2008
From this Eurogamer news article:
Microsoft has boasted selling over 2 million copies of Gears of War 2 during its opening weekend.
Furthermore, more than 1.5 million Xbox Live account holders played the game, according to Major Nelson – clocking up a record 15 million gameplay hours between them.
15 million hours is a lot of CPU time on the triple-core Xenon that runs a 360; a lot of processor power.
There might not be a cognitive surplus, but here’s a thought: what happens if, as a kind of “CPU-tax”, you require manufacturers to include an “extra” CPU or core in certain kinds of products – entertainment products, set-top boxes, consoles, PVRs, that kind of thing. That CPU is self-contained – processor memory, the lot – and devoted to running something like Folding@Home in the background, or whatever the next massive philanthropic grid-computing project the world needs to run is. Maybe you specify specific charity interests you have, so you can contribute to projects you care more about.
And then you have 15 million hours of 3 cores running Gears of War 2, and 15 million hours of protein-folding. Seems like a good trade-off to me.
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I have had this in the top corner of my screen as a kind of company. They are delightful little things. I am not normally a dog person, or sentimental, but they're just too delightful. Especially when they're asleep.