"LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua." And it all looks rather pretty, too. Must investigate further!

danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.

"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.

"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.

"This is not intended to be a fun game. It has all the trappings of a LEGO game. It has the forgiving game mechanics. The ease of control. But it uses these elements to create a cognitive dissonance between the ease of the actions and the terrible nature of their real world counterparts." Corvus hypothesises what A Lego Clockwork Orange might look like. Thoughtful stuff.

"So why not embrace it? That's why You Have To Burn The Rope is fantastic… for games to become art there must be an awareness and a conversation with its own history. Film, music, and literary critic call this allusion, but for the creators, this isn't just a word, it's a dialogue. Which means it should invite participants. For me, I'm far more intrigued by stop-motion artist Patrick Boivin's attempt at turning a linked sequence of videos into Youtube Street Fighter." I'm not sure I agree with Wang on YHTBTR, specifically, but this paragraph is reasonably sensible.

65 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad, this LJ post shows photographs from the late 1940s merged with images of the location in the present. All are striking; some are very sad. Great contextualisation, though.

"I’m a web developer at heart, and a scripting language user by preference. Coding for the iPhone doesn’t feel as fluid in text handling or HTTP access as the environments I’m used to. Fortunately I’ve been able to find some fantastic open-source libraries and wrappers that make up the difference. Here are my favourites so far:" A useful – and interesting – set of links from Matt B.

"Oh words, words, words." Beautiful. Thanks, Simon.

"The Wii has captured the imagination of millions of people who didn't consider themselves gamers at all. Why are we so surprised? All this has happened before." And, no doubt, all of it will happen again. Some good insight and quotation from Mitch Krpata on a history of Nintendo's console marketing and sales strategies.

War reporting from a virtual world; Jim Rossignol documents the first skirmishes in the Offworld/RPS/Escapist conflict. Looking forward to more of this.

"It is from the era when people were all 'we will not know if acid is dangerous until we test it on THE FOXIEST GIRLS IN ENGLAND.'" Too right.

If you can see it, it exists. If you can't, it doesn't. Lovely, tough, fun.

"We were delighted to have George Oates, ex of Flickr who started and managed the Commons, come to visit us at the National Maritime Museum in November 2008. When she was here she curated some Commons content for us. This set is the first of this content." Some wonderful selections; the full archive must be remarkable.

"Perhaps more charities should project a less glamorous image, and remind us that they still have to do all the boring stuff that everyone does at work. And perhaps then we wouldn’t have such unreasonable expectations. Sponsor a filing cabinet, sir?" The thing I like most about this is being told exactly where your contribution goes; you get a real connection with a real thing. I'd rather buy charities a shelving unit than £25 of vague platitudes.

"One [memory] always stuck with me was him showing a moody, uplit black-and-white press portrait of Richard Meier in the cliché black-turtleneck and severe glasses in front of venetian blinds – eyes directed up and away in search of the future – very fountainhead. Kaplicky rumbled: “This is not design”. He pointed at me to click the slide carousel forward. An image of a carpark full of Boeing employees, from design engineers to HR to office cleaners in 777 project t-shirts waving at the camera. Kaplicky, now beaming, crookedly: “This. This is design.”" Sounds about right to me.

"Multiplayer Design Lead Tyson Green checked a week ago in with a lengthy explanation of the melee system in Halo 3, how it’s different from Halo 2’s what worked about both versions, what didn’t work and how it’s being addressed by the auto update. here's a reminder of what he explained." Via Offworld, this frankly excellent explanation of a Halo 3 patch from early 2008, explaining the problems latency brough to melee combat, and why Bungie implemented their solutions as they did. Clear, educational, and it feels like the right answer. More writing like this, please, games industry!

Playground for Google's Ajax APIs. Well implemented, and very useful.

"Isla Lyddle End lies on the far east of the British Archipelago. It is the largest of the eastern islands in what was once the continuous land mass known as Hornbyshire. Isla Lyddle End celebrates the Golden Jubilee of The Grand Iman of Britain HH Patel bin Windsor with a minaret clock tower, constructed of hard-pack, molded synthetic carbon nodules in full compliance with the Rock and Soil Conservation Act of 2038." Julian's Lyddle End 2050 entry is excellent.

For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.

"I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.

"Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."

"Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.

"Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.

"'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' … It's because computers are fire… If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process–documentation, as it were–but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."

This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.

The Offworld 20 "…isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.

"Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it… turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.

"…my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological– lighting effects, texture work, mocapping– but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."

"…it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."

"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.

"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.

"I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand… These suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future." But of course.

"The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.

Lanchester writing about games, from the point of view of a smart person who's actually played the games he described. I certainly don't agree with all his points, but I don't disagree with them all, and he's not mouthing off: he's making smart connections and indicating more than a passing familiarity with the medium. Might write a tad more on this.

"1352 components driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums, prices range from $275k–$400k." Ignoring the price: do want very much.

It's basically Outrun 2 SP, but in hi-def, and on XBLA and PSN. And it looks like it has all the music intact. Very exciting!

The metagame is the game. Use the elephant to earn achievements. Apart from earning slightly /too/ many instantly at the beginning, it's a lot of fun. Don't reach for the hints too early.

Yes, it's an app about weight loss. But: the UI is superb in its touchability and suitability for task at hand, and the reporting functionality is solid (and looks like it'll get much better).

"Herzog Zwei was a lot of fun, but I have to say the other inspiration for Dune II was the Mac software interface. The whole design/interface dynamics of mouse clicking and selecting desktop items got me thinking, ‘Why not allow the same inside the game environment? Why not a context-sensitive playfield? To hell with all these hot keys, to hell with keyboard as the primary means of manipulating the game!" Brett Sperry, of Westwood, on the making of Dune II. Via Offworld.

"Changing the Game (order via Amazon or B&N) is a fast-paced tour of the many ways in which games, already an influential part of millions of people’s lives, have become a profoundly important part of the business world. From connecting with customers, to attracting and training employees, to developing new products and spurring innovation, games have introduced a new level of fun and engagement to the workplace.

Changing the Game introduces you to the ways in which games are being used to enhance productivity at Microsoft, increase profits at Burger King, and raise employee loyalty at Sun Microsystems, among other remarkable examples. It is proof that work not only can be fun–it should be." I shall have to check this out.

"As a result, vendors here are more likely to decline to sell you something than to cough up any of their increasingly precious coins in change. I've tried to buy a 2-peso candy bar with a 5-peso note only to be refused, suggesting that the 2-peso sale is worth less to the vendor than the 1-peso coin he would be forced to give me in change." They're running out of coins in Argentina, and it makes for a seriously odd situation – and a reminder of the differences between value and worth.

"The artist Keith Tyson is offering 5,000 Guardian readers the opportunity to own a free downloadable artwork by him. The costs you'll have to bear are those of printing out the work on A3 photographic paper – and framing, if you so choose… You will be asked to enter your geographical location – which forms part of the unique title of each print."

"The media would have us believe that those with the best ability in Parkour require and condition to bodies of hypermasculine levels, and the first notions of this concept seem quite logical. However, it is known to any traceur that the spectacle of the masculinized body is not in necessary relation to one’s ability of movement. Mass media tries to paint another picture with a careful selection of handsome, muscular men as traceurs… At its simplest, the hypermasculine spectacle is an easier sell to masses. However, our problem does not end at the body. It is not only the body that is masculinized, though, as we see the same pattern occurring to the discipline itself." Interesting article on Parkour and gender; specifically, the hyper-masculinisation of the art by the media.

"Over three years ago I set a goal for myself. That goal was to have a max level character for every class in the game… Tonight, at long last, I’ve finally achieved my goal." Blimey.

"After a sixteen year wait, one of the most highly acclaimed radio programmes of the nineties, featuring a uniquely talented combination of acclaimed comedy writers and actors, will finally be released in 2008." Oh, yes please.

It doesn't get much more niche; long-suffering Prinny finally gets a break from being tossed around and exploding and given his own game. The first trailer is mainly about how much Nippon Ichi exploit him in their office. It's like one big in-joke… and it's getting properly localized! NIS are good to us, dood.

Some interesting user research, especially when it comes to understandings of the device, and perceptions of the App Store. It's amazing how people's attitude to price changes when you've got a small screen, a market saturated with cheap goods, and a product that isn't in a box.

Just so beautiful. Now: I just need a video of it rotating on loop, please.

"[The modern supervillain's] hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile phone…. for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam employed to support character and storytelling." The network as fortress and ideology all at once.

Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.

Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.

Jaw well and truly on the floor.

"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."

"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.