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“…the price of acquitting ourselves of the charge of infantilism is the disavowal of what is vital and compelling about the games themselves.” Pliskin on applying Pauline Kael’s criticisms of film criticism to games.
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“Yes, that’s an underscore character in front of the .collect. In irb (and hence, script/console), an underscore is a kind of global variable that holds the last result.” I did not know that. Useful!
Develop Online (and a quick recap)
29 July 2008
It’s been a crazy few weeks, so it’s only now that I’m getting around to mentioning (again) that I’m going to be speaking at Develop Online today. The talk is called Playing Together: What Games Can Learn From Social Software, and it bears a marked resemblance to the session I gave at NLGD a month or so back. I’m looking forward to it, even if it’s a bit nerve-wracking to be talking to a slightly different audience to normal.
Once I’ve given the Develop talk, it’ll be available online. I’m looking forward to sharing this talk with people outside the circle it was initially written for.
I’ve also got a few more talks to put online, which I’ll be organising over the coming week or so.
The first is my session from Skillswap Brighton (and LRUG before that) entitled Settling New Caprica: Getting Your Pet Project Off The Ground, which is all about shipping for yourself and making spare-time projects into reality. I think I mentioned that earlier.
The second is a session I gave to some students at the Polis Summer School, run by Charlie Beckett – a summer school on international journalism and its future. Charlie initially asked me to talk having read an an article I wrote for the New Statesman in 2007. I gave a session entitled “Journalism in a Data-Rich World“, exploring what journalism on the web of data might (and does) look like. From the feedback they gave, they seemed to really enjoy it, which was good.
So those will be coming online very shortly. Then I can stop writing about the past, and look to the future again. Looking forward to that.
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Oh my. Slides from Ludicorp’s presentation in which they launched Flickr at ETech 2004. So much that’s still so relevant, still not always understood. Wish I could just throw this at people at Develop instead of my talk.
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“Textmate Bundle for RSpec plain text stories”. Some nice snippets and solid syntax-highlighting, which is just what I need.
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“Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data.”
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“ActivePresenter works just like an ActiveRecord model, except that it works with multiple models at the same time. Let me show you.” Ooh – a Presenter class that doesn’t seem like too much effort. Duly noted.
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“Our challenge now is to keep a very close eye on the mise en place, because if one cook changes even a little detail of one of the key ingredients—the width of the tomato slices, the amount of mustard on the bun—the harmony of these burgers is lost.”
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“…by stringing together “first-order” desires for loot and approval, these games train us to be passive pursuers of one desire after another rather than engaged critics.” Part 2 of Pliskin’s analysis of Benjamin Barber’s “Consumed”.
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“Wetherspoons is a model of market efficiency. Prices are low, economies of scale are passed on to consumers and people are offered real choice, on the assumption that they are intelligent enough to deal with it.”
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I like some of Lipo’s design ideas – Pillar Values, Pillar Verbs – but I’m not convinced by the examples he uses; I always get scared of this development-by-list idea. Still, more on focus on limitations, and the “resources without meaning” point is good.
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“When asked if she planned to pursue her interest in fashion, she said no. ‘I want to work with computers because they give you power.'” Some great stuff on “Passion Communities” as an alternative means of learning and education.
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Gosh. Long, detailed, smart, wonderful interview with Jonathan Blow. I can’t even begin to find a suitably quote for this box so: please, just *read* it.
Back to Bioshock
27 July 2008
or: trust the designer, not the mechanic.
I have a problem with not finishing games. I doubt I am the only one. But sometimes I become disappointed with my inability/lack of time to finish a game, and Bioshock is one title I’m disappointed not to have put more time into.
Most games stop being played either because my interest wanes or beacuse they demanded too much time. Bioshock did neither. Bioshock was, whilst I was playing it, wonderful: simple mechanics, but deep design; beautiful architecture; solid story-telling.
I was really enjoying it, and really into it – and then we broke up. We broke up because of what it asked me to do.
Continue reading this post…
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“One of the ways in which we explore possible design directions is by building simple, playable prototypes that we can play around with to get a sense for a particular system.” … and so EA have released them to play with. Nice.
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“Dark Room Sex Game is an award-winning multiplayer, erotic rhythm game without any visuals, played only by audio and haptic cues. The game can be played with Nintendo Wiimote controllers or a keyboard.” Um, wow.
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“It’s 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future. (Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation)” Such typefaces; such hair.
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“The scale is similar to many other systems in that it does not take danger or fear into account.” Too right. I am going to stick to my V0 and V1 routes until I’m a lot more stable.
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A beautiful series of photographs of labs at night; lovely interface to browse them, too. Science is awesome.
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Blimey. A sea of hipsters.
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“Where did we lose our nuance? When did we all become so beastly that we forgot how to have a conversation? Or was it always like so?” Some lovely writing from Simon Parkin.
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365 free games – download or flash or otherwise – collected by the PC Gamer staff, and now free on Games Radar. Only looked at the first page, but there’s loads of good stuff. I mean, it *starts* with Kenta Cho…
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“Too often, developers only test their features and don’t go outside that box. […] when you are in scoring mode, you’ll take the time to check out all the new features to see what you can break to score big.” Rules for turning QA into a game.
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“Cosmology is the girl that doesn’t really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.” Link of the day, no question. Funny, and just-right-enough to make it funnier.
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“In I-Fluid you will experience our everyday life from the eyes of…a drop of water!” Stunningly beautiful physics-oriented Windows puzzle game. Makes me want to buy a PC right now.
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“…arguments of this exact form have been raised against nearly every distinctly modern art form.” Barber’s book sounds interesting, if flawed. Pliskin’s criticism is, as ever, good. It’s getting exhausting linking to him.
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“You’re insane! No-one uses Microsoft Works any more!” Jolly good. Better than good, in fact: mailbox. Open mailbox.
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“I wanted to generate some visualizations of our project’s growth, so I decided to put together a little shell script that looked at the output from git log to spit out some metrics.” Ooh, nice one, Carlos!