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"Trust is the key to breaking [this cycle]. And I think Talese’s method shows us how we might gain it: by checking with our subjects and making sure we understand what they’re trying to express, beyond what they actually say. Because if our subjects are interesting enough to report on, they’re deserving of respect. And if we respect them, they will respect us. That’s a much more virtuous circle." I think Alex is right, you know.
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"I am currently using heart measurement equipment for an experiment as part of my PhD and for fun (N=1 isn't usually great Science) I thought I would bring the equipment home last weekend and see what my heart looks like when I am playing a mutliplayer game of Halo Reach (Slayer DMRs on Zealot – Blue Team). Here is what I found."
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"Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy." I know that the rhetoric works better as a speech than in writing; still I can't help but agree with this. It tugs at things important to me, and what a small village public library meant for my childhood.
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"Oregon Trail pioneering is basically the story of trying to get 500 pounds of jarred bison over the border before succumbing to necrotising poison from eating the wrong kind of strawberry. It’s the story of dying at Chimney Rock with bits of Conestoga wheels lodged in your skull. When you look into the Trail, the Trail looks back into you."
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"If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship."
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"In 1992, Wolfenstein 3-D revolutionized video games and created the 3D first-person shooter genre. Now, after decades of development, Wolfenstein 3-D has been converted to breathtaking, epoch-making 1-D. You can now play the game in a single, dazzling one-pixel line." Title-sequence and everything. Spot-on. Much like Cow Clicker, if you're going to make the joke, you have to make the game.
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Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)
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"The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.
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"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.
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"Here at the Cow Clicker ranch, we've learned an important lesson about cow clicking: people don't just want one chance to click a cow every six hours. They want as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." And then Ian launches the API. And Connect. And everything else. And wins again.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R./H.C.S.D.
21 January 2011
Alone For All Seasons is Matt Sakey’s chapter on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise from Well Played 2.0 – a book of criticism, one game per chapter. It’s now available to read online. It’s a cracking read; despite having read a large chunk of the writing about the game, I’ve not played any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise myself.
In the article, Sakey comments on the titular acronym, branded onto the player-character (and, indeed, other Stalkers) by the Zone itself:
It brainwashes or kills anyone who comes close to discovering it, marking the corpses as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s – scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, killers, explorers, and robbers. The tattoo is a scarlet letter left behind on unwelcome intruders as a warning to the others.
Scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, killers, explorers, and robbers.
A categorisation that immediately takes me back to Richard Bartle’s Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds and his four MUD player types (Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers, Killers).
There’s an interesting subtly to its divisions. Play-as-trespass, for instance, is an immediately interesting one: exploration as transgression rather than just for its own sake. Scavenger and Robber play out in a similar axis: hunting for treasure that’s there to be taken, against taking what you find regardless of whether it’s treasure. There’s not much room for Socialisers in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe, though; that role is taken by the Loner.
The Zone knows it’s being played with, and marks out its prey as exactly what it knows them to be: players.
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"Giving a PS3 owner of Portal 2 the ability to also play their game on the PC and Mac is an extension of this philosophy. From our perspective, it's not two copies of a game; it's the same game, but with Sony's help we've worked out a method to allow that Portal 2 PS3 customer to also play their game on the PC and Mac." …is the right answer. Well done, Valve.
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"The nature of an interactive medium should be the feedback loop between the player and the game; to not explore (or, at least, consider) the expression space of this cycle seems to be a missed opportunity." Trent raises some good points about the relationship between narratives and the systems that tell them.
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"And I don't think games are happiness engines, either. They are complex, rusty machines built to show us that the world is so much bigger and weirder than we expected. I play games to remind me of this. I make them for that purpose too." Lots of great stuff in here, especially the stuff about "winning" versus "coming to understandings". As someone whose happiest experiences of media are often the slow, subtle, dawning ones, I think I might be on Bogost's side here. But: I haven't read the book yet.
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"A sense of achievement without the capital ‘A’ is a better reward than anything Microsoft’s Funpoints can throw at you, and the very best Achievements are ones which reward actual achievement. When a player does something he or she know is awesome and the game agrees with them , it only makes the sense of achievement greater. Success in a game is better when you have an audience – in the absence of nearby friends, Achievements should be your audience."