"THIS LITTLE WAY SHAKESPEARE ESCALATING THE STAKES AND POSITIONING THE ENDGAME = THE SAME EXACT WAY HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITERS HANDLE THE ENTIRE MIDDLE PARTS OF THEIR GODDAMN MOVIE.

NO WONDER THEY AIMLESS AND BORING." Film Crit Hulk is brilliant.

"…you play other roles than “protagonist.” That there are other ways of seeing." Very good.

"Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C." Linus doesn't like C++.

"The tragedy of Nico Belic is that, narratologically and in terms of the game mechanic, he can never stop using people as a means rather than an end."

"Film and television are in many ways a technological enhancement and hybridization of older broadcast media, such as the novel, the play, or the album, but they are still fundamentally part of the broadcast culture paradigm. Games, I believe, are not part of the same paradigm. Games belong to a different paradigm that includes the oral tradition of storytelling, improvisational music, sport, dance, philosophical debate, improv theatre, and parlour games (among many other cultural forms)." A tiny fragment of a great post from Clint (which is really, really wanting to make me return to Far Cry 2 soon).

"A great deal of what is called `digital art’ is not digital art at all, and it seems many digital artists seem ashamed of the digital.  In digital installation art, the screen and keyboard are literally hidden in a box somewhere, as if words were a point of shame.  The digital source code behind the work is not shown, and all digital output is only viewable by the artist or a technician for debugging purposes.  The experience of the actual work is often entirely analog, the participant moves an arm, and observes an analog movement in response, in sight, sound or motor control.  They may choose to make jerky, discontinuous movements, and get a discontinuous movement in response, but this is far from the complexity of digital language.  This kind of installation forms a hall of mirrors.  You move your arm around and look for how your movement has been contorted."

"If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows." Rod's lists are always good.

I've used the Settings plugin a lot, but it's very old and dusty. This is a nice fork of it, ported to Rails 3, and saved for future reference.

"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope. The game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach."

"This is a cross between Minesweeper and an RPG. You gain levels by killing weak monsters and win when you defeat them all. It's a bit different than Minesweeper in that the number you reveal when you click on a square is the total of the levels of the monsters in adjacent squares." Uh-oh.

"His earliest revelation about how the TV medium worked—one that heavily influences Community—came courtesy of a Cheers board game he spotted at a toy store. He realized that the characters were so relatable and their dynamics so clearly defined that anyone could step into their lives—even in a board game." Brilliant interview with Dan Harmon – but this paragraph really leapt out at me.

An unexpected place for a Le Guin interview, but it's great nontheless.

"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.

It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."

List of all 58 fonts now in iOS, mainly for reference. (Although, eesh, Zapfino AND Papyrus? Really?)

Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.

"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.

"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."

"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.

"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.

A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).

"Between 2007 and 2009 GameLayers made a multiplayer game across all the content of the internet. I was the CEO of GameLayers and one of the co-founders. Here I'll share stories and data from this online social game startup. This story covers prototyping, fund raising, company building, strategic shifting, winding down and moving on." Brutally honest writing from Justin. It's detailed, clear, and the financial figures are worth a read if you're even remotely thinking about things that look like this. Definitely worth your time.

Kars' "hypertext remix" of his marvellous dConstruct talk. It was sensitive and well thought-through, and appealed to me as both a designer and game maker. Very much worth your time.

"With the full avatar spritesheets available in the API, we dream of Glitch characters overflowing the bounds of the browser —and even the game itself— to find new adventures, anywhere people can take them. To this end, our new developer site is chock-full of resources to enable web/HTML5, iOS, and Android developers to build interesting applications leveraging Glitch APIs." Full spritesheets! Gorgeous. But really: this has the potential to be super-brilliant, and it's nicely designed. Hopefully more conventional developers will get on this sort of thing at some point. Bungie? Valve? Blizzard? Watch out.

"In re­cent re­leases, Sa­fari has been re-ar­chi­tected, with some of the work farmed out to a thing called “WebProcess”. This doesn’t seem to be work­ing out that well." Much as I was excited about Safari 5's re-architecting, I must admit: I've seen everything Tim says, and it's driving me nuts.

"I think games connect us to a time when we had time. In your youth, time is elastic. You have exactly as much of it as you need. You have no responsibilities. No job, no children. Nothing but time, and friends, and shit to play with. When we play games now, as adults with too much stuff going on, we do so because we’ve made time for them. We’ve set time aside to indulge in some nonsense with people we love. When you make that time, you HAVE that time. And when you have that time, it’s like being back there – back in that place, that living room, that bedroom, that house full of memories. With time to spare, and everything exactly as it was." Oh, Rab. Marvellous.

"He spends a chapter meditating on the nature of practice and mastery, both in general and in its application to Breakout. Eventually, and after much frustration, he concludes that Breakout doesn’t want to be played that way. Instead, he embraces what he calls the game’s “lucratively programmed caring,” the way its few but distinct design elements work together to guide the player into getting incrementally better at it, revealing more about its inner workings, bit by bit — but only for those who fulfill their end of its contract, who agree to approach the game on its own terms. Treating it like a piano exercise, it turns out, doesn’t work." I'm reading Pilgrim at the moment, and it's an incredible book for all manner of reasons. This lovely piece is something to return to when I finish it.