"Proteus, in the end, helps me move further into a design philosophy that avoids blacks and whites, finding a comfortable home in the much less solid greys.  Videogames aren’t about mechanics.  They aren’t about visual or audio either.  They aren’t about the ideas of the author or about the experience of the player.  They aren’t about story or actions or strategy.  They aren’t about controllers or processors or screens.  They aren’t about technology or culture or ritual.

Videogames are a combination of all these factors, or a combination of some of these factors.  Videogames are whatever we want them to be.  For Ed Key and David Kanaga, while making Proteus, videogames are about the beauty of walking, looking, and listening." However much I bang on about rules/systems/you know the score, I still very much agree with this. I still like the abstract.

Not a bad list, especially for sites needing hardcore, tight, front-end work, and that are going to face load.

Mitu makes a series of interesting connections here, though the conclusion she came to isn't quite the same as mine – which is in the comments. But there's a mass of starting points here as to notions of the "abstract", and what it might mean for games. Something I shall be returning to, for sure.

"Maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me come home." Jesus, this is not far from making me tear up. I really need to do something about my sympathy-for-small-robots thing.

If you're anything like me, you probably never go near the "Indie Games" tab on Live marketplace. Which is a shame: there's some great stuff amongst all the chaff there. This post points to some good stuff from last year; Leave Home is cracking, as is "I maed a gam3…" (don't be put off by the title).

"Abstract shooter with dynamic difficulty and metaphorical explosions. Fixed length game session. Score points. Increase difficulty. Split shots. Leave Home…" 240MSP, for your Xbox 360, and it's out now. That's, like £1.50 or something. It's bloody marvellous; great soundtrack, tough difficulty, lovely use of the analogue trigger, super-pretty in high-def. No excuse not to buy it, really.

"You send an old sweater to my mom. She unravels it… and knits you a scarf." This is brilliant.

Jason Rohrer has a new puzzle game out, designed primarily for iPhone but also available for OSX/Windows/Linux as ever. The UI is very thoughtful, for something finger-driven; the game mechanic is complex, but I think I'll get a handl eon it soon. I hope.

"As I watched the gunfire on screen, I should have been wondering what it was like to actually be in the shoes of those soldiers. But as I sat staring, I instead wondered whether the Marines had bothered to observe that building for civilian inhabitants before demolishing it. I wondered how any Marine that got shot in Iraq could endorse a game based on Fallujah where you can be hit by a hail of bullets and walk away. By the end, I was left wondering what Konami was thinking." A strong article from Nick Breckon on the problems already showing with Six Days In Fallujah. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, and not at all knee-jerk. I, too, am already concerned.

Lovely: Creature Comforts meets "Hey There Little Fella". Totally charming.

Ocean Quigley has a blog, and whilst all the stuff on Spore and Sim City 4 is super-nice, what I really like are his paintings and sketches, which are just lovely.

"Daily deep-dive analysis of a specimen from the modern world's most exciting communication medium for penis humor."

"An image a day and an MP3 to go with it, for no obvious reason." And no RSS, so you'll just have to turn up every day. Lovely concept.

Wonderful, delightful, charming writing from Duncan Fyfe; this, and the eight chapters that follow it, are pretty essential, and they're nice and brief. Speculative fiction about games, culture, and the future. And fandom.

Gosh, that looks lovely – and bonus points for a preview video that films the iPhone, showing the way fingers work on its surface, rather than just showing the results of interactions.

"for a while now we’ve been meaning to post some early childhood snapshots of world of goo, to dig deep into our code repository and remember the good ol’ days. the early part of a game’s development is often very enjoyable because things evolve rapidly and there’s a great sense of accomplishment. it’s also a lot of fun to look back at those early days and laugh at what the game use to look and feel like." First in a seven part series, in which 2D Boy walk us through the – playable – origins of World of Goo. Game devs: more like this, please.

"…it turns out that a GBA and a cart isn’t any more use than a GBA on its own. It’s only when you build a machine out of a GBA and a cart and a me that you’ve got a real Rhythm Tengoku Machine. Bolt those three components together and you’ve built an entirely new organism, an extraordinary creature who can shoot ghosts, dance with monkeys, and climb stars like staircases."

"You’ll win the game if you’re the only one playing the game at the moment in the world. The game checks over the internet if there are other people playing it at the moment and it’ll kill the game if someone else is playing it. You have to play the game for 4 minutes and 33 seconds." High concept, I'll give it that.

"Durham University's Dr Shamus Smith, who helped spearhead the project, told BBC News that that while bespoke 3D modelling software was available, modifying a video game was faster, more cost effective, and had better special effects." Quite true. Although: "gamers" tend to treat it as a game, wheras "non-gamers" treat it as a training exercise, and behave accordingly.

Microsoft on their new MSN Music service, weighed-down by DRM. I don't normally link to stuff about DRM, but frankly, every single response in this is comedy gold.

"The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan."

Beautiful.

"Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." Yes.

You can now use Shoulda macros in RSpec as well as Test::Unit. Thanks, Thoughtbot! Might take a poke at this some time.

"The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling." 3000+ photographs, with what seems like a confusing-and-shiny interface to explore them – but hides a detailed metadata manipulation layer underneath. Beautiful pictures, too. Something really quite special; the "interface" pages should explain more.

"Still, overall, Left 4 Dead's opening cinematic is a shockingly complete primer to the rest of the game. With only a few exceptions, almost any player going into Left 4 Dead for the first time will know exactly how to play the game: they already know the gameplay, the weapons, the enemies, the win scenario and the strategies they need to get through the game alive… the only thing not covered in the opening movie is the specifics of the interface." Yes – had this exact same conversation a few days ago. Although John is awfully down on Louis, which seems a tad unfair…

"The obstacles that exist are mere impediments to my motion, puzzles placed only to slow me down or stop my free-flow kinetic improvisation. No time to think or overanylize, only time enough to move. This is what the essence of gaming should feel like: a sincere, wholehearted attachment to the action (or actions) that one sets into play. It is a moment where the motivation at hand is intention only, whose aim is exploration and discovery, refined. It is the escape, distilled and realized." GWJ on Mirror's Edge, and never rewinding, never looking back.

"Metro Rules of Conduct is a game about the awkward situation of commuting in my hometown, Stockholm. Look at mobile phones, MP3 players and breast for score, but whatever you do – avoid eye contact!" Wonderful; the art-style works really well, as does the head-bob.

"Melville was torn between writing a ripping nautical yarn and a metaphysical odyssey, and it shows. Rockstar was torn between constructing a sandbox and a stage, and it shows. The result was a tenuously fused work of genuine Americana: a disorderly paean to the American city, a bit of ultraviolence, a stonkingly beautiful soundtrack, a fable, a simulation, a gonzo critique of capitalism. It's a game we deserve. " Pliskin on what GTA4 meant. Perhaps hyperbolic, but it's an important signifier of this year. The Redding quotation about Far Cry 2 is also a stonker.

All 226 entrants for the 2009 IGF. Heard of – and played – some of these, but many are unknown. Exciting to see the list, though, if only to be reminded that there's this many games being made and funded independently, at the large and small scale.

"aphex twin + vassily kandinsky + doom 2" – now that's a tagline.

Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.

"We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."

"This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop…" Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.

"This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."

"# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.

Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.

"Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. … [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."

Jordan Mechner is serialising – and backdating – his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.

"In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.

"The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.