"Here is, instead, the first reading that occurred to me, looking at these reimagined vistas set among the tall columns of RIBA headquarters: the idea that videogame architecture is essentially a folly, something that takes the form of a building that has a physical function, but which cannot meaningfully fulfil that function and which instead uses its simulated practicality to fulfil, say, an emotional or aesthetic or wayfinding purpose. I read Playing the Picturesque as suggesting that we might use the existing centuries of design and discussion around follies, and the long related history of arguments about the “picturesque”, to usefully inform the ways that we look at videogame architecture."

Lovely writing – dense, detailed, and shrewd – from Holly about a show I must go and check out.

"The new thing won’t be better, you just aren’t aware of all of the ways it will be terrible yet."

I am at the point in my career where I nod along at _all_ of this, often with real experience. It maps neatly to my current experience of moving lots of things to simpler technologies (text files, flat HTML, and glue-of-your-choice).

The kind of thinking that makes you appreciate a company's work: clarity of design, whilst understanding themselves as part of an ecosystem (as opposed to: wanting to be your everything). I really like Valhalla's products.

Nice writeup of "press forward" tracks in Trackmania from Robert Yang. I knew about the genre, but hadn't twigged that the key to its existence was that Trackmania's physics are deterministic. Which of course, makes sense, now I think of it.

"I view ValhallaPlate as being closely related to an SM57. Or a hammer. No need to be delicate with the tool. No need to think about things too much. It just works." I liked this line on toolmaking, especially when it comes to music technology.

Much more Illustrator-like than Sketch is, in many ways, and affordable. Certainly leaps ahead of Inkscape in not being rubbish. Going to use this for lasercutting/frontpanel work, I think.

Really good article on the realities of installing iBeacons, and, secondarily, the way you develop your own internal processes just to solve workflow. I liked the trolly; I felt for the BKM very much as I read this.

Fascinating article capturing how various translators worked around their languages to translate not only the absence of gendered language _suggested_ in Ancillary Justice, but also the author's deliberate use of the feminine as a generic case. (Also, how to translate things for different cultures – what they expect and what they intimate).

Yes, it's a bit heavily focused on copying/emulation, but there's some useful stuff in here and some interesting starting points.

Thoughtbot's engine for Rails admin UIs, sans-DSLs. Filed away for reference.

Corrie Corfield on Peter Donaldson. Lovely.

[this is good] and I will remember more of it in future.

Wonderful, dense, three-part study of one of GTA V's renderer. I like Adrian's posts because he focuses on the art of the technology, as well as the technology of the art; a reminder that game art isn't just plonking OBJ files into a world, but relies on a whole host of developers, maths, and drawcalls.

Interesting; the wrapper Github used for Atom, as a platform. Makes building desktop applications for web-folk like me a notch easier, though as ever, I find the Javascript ecosystem baffling.

Wonderful article from an architect who worked on "The Witness" about the role of architecture practice in game design, and all the rough edges architects see within game worlds. Good on spatial design principles, too.

"Every gallery project needs an Andy" – and other insights from Tim Hunkin on installation design, following his work on 'The Secret Life of the Home' at the Science Museum. All rings very true for me, and glad to see it's not just me that finds this sort of stuff challenging. Also: very interesting on museum culture.

Lovely interview between Jeff Bridges and Roger Deakins – on film, and how they get made, and feel. Lots of deep knowledge and affection in this; I really enjoyed it.

Newspaper Club is a great product – but I'm really glad Tom's written about the technical underpinnings of the latest version of the code, because it's super impressive. They threw out InDesign and replaced it with their own renderer, written in Cocoa; they have a gorgeous, rich Javascript client that's a joy to use; and they have a development team of 2. TWO. Brilliant work, folks.

",,,he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself." Spectacular photography; what a building.

"…the definition of a bot seems quite arbitrary, where do we call an application or a string of actions or scripts a 'bot', and where or when do we call it something else? Is the only reason for calling a scripted set of actions a bot, the fact that the script takes the role (and maybe the place) of a human being as a form of artificial intelligence, like they do for instance on wikipedia, in chatrooms, twitter or spamming us through mail (do they really set out to maximize their chances of success? – which is what often AI delineates)?
And what about the new generations of Twitter web scutter that does not seem to be intelligible in any human-sense kind of way, but do follow scripts and try to maximize something (followers, tweets)?" Bookmarked if only for use of the phrase "web scutter".

"I've often felt a sense of sadness that it's only the final piece that sees the light of day; there's a lightness to the experimentation that goes into the early parts of projects, when you're not worried so much about final implementation and instead can just play. We're going to start exposing some of this process, and this post is about the thinking that went into http://migration.stamen.com/, a recent project for Esquire Magazine." Lovely post from Stamen about the early stages of invention for this project.

Nice post about building your own maptiles in Tilemill. Something to return to when I have a location-specific maps problem to solve, perhaps.

Really interesting post about the architecture at Tumblr, which has changed a lot over the past few years, and is a fascinating selection of tools stacked together. Especially good on the reasoning behind tool selection.

“What Bella doesn’t know is that this is no ordinary home, and the Cullens are no ordinary family. By rescuing an innocent girl from where she fell, they have set her upon a path that could change all their lives for ever. And when Bella emerges from the other end of that path, she may find that things are not what she expected in… the Twilight Zone.” This is priceless.

"Yes, we could have started with the placeholder structures and made them more elaborate and better-looking, in a general video-game-level-design way, but that’s different from having well-thought-out ideas subtly embodied in the structures of the areas, which is what we are going for." The Witness used real architecture and landscape architecture firms to help design its world.

"I am not naive and I am not a fool. I realize that gamification is the easy answer for deploying a perversion of games as a mod marketing miracle. I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing. For the rest, those of you who would consider that games can offer something different and greater than an affirmation of existing corporate practices, the business world has another name for you: they call you "leaders."" Ian's whole article is great, and the comment thread is eye-opening.

"Something terrible has happened in our city (and may yet continue to happen). It's damnable, deplorable, heartbreaking. But it is also extraordinary, unusual, bizarre. Slamming the door on it without studying and understanding it is a dangerous and short-term tactic. Allowing yourself to feel nothing but anger, and doing nothing but lashing out … isn't that a little mindless? It would be nice, and useful, if we could ask London "why" without already having an answer in mind." Excellent, sober, cautious writing from Will Wiles.

"In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds — tabletop game designers, digital game designers, and game studies academics — talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles."

Lovely little round-up of games about architecture and the urban environment from Kars.