"By enabling the brain to manipulate with virtual systems, to engage with simulation, it creates systems than span the mental and the virtual, the biological and the electrical. Also, even more significantly to my point, our imagination is not a description as a book is a textual description, or a film is a visual description. It is, instead, a model." This is good, and the links are great, too.

"Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime." This is good: game as structure, the core loop as enacted by the player being what brings it to life, structures it according to its audience.

"Far Cry 2 invites fatalism, pessimism, and near-suicidal tactics because optimism and strategy went on holiday to Leboa-Sako and got murdered just like everything else. Hoping for the best doesn’t work. Being clever doesn’t work. Nothing good will ever happen to you in Far Cry 2′s Africa, and none of your carefully-designed plans will ever bear fruit."

"The optical future of architectural ornament: light with content. <br />
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That is, you get home with your digital camera and you click back through to see what you've photographed—and there are words, shapes, and objects hovering there in the street, or inside the buildings you once stood within, visual data only revealed through long-exposures." Brilliant.

"After seeing there is a turing complete language in game, I felt like I should do something interesting with redstone in Minecraft. People already have done clocks and adders so I wanted to do something a little different while also be potentially useful. As a result, I designed out a ticker display." At least as crazy as those LittleBigPlanet calculators.

"Nelson, as described by IDEO in the video above, does so much work for you. It throws multiple perspectives into the equation, killing the unreliable narrator with the gifts of foresight and hindsight. It does away with the unexplainable appeal of a surprising hit novel giving you a league table of books to pick from according to their “impact on popular opinion and debate.” You’ll struggle to form your own opinion as you jump through the layers that Nelson offers you, given a perspective like a student browbeaten by an overbearing A-Level tutor." I similarly disliked their attempts to not only redesign the book, but to try to redesign narrative, in "Alice" – as if people hadn't tried, and as if what narrative _really_ needed was just a good design firm to take a crack at it.

Jamie Fristrom on collaborative-storytelling-RPGs. Lots of good links and thoughts here – especially the line about White Wolf's "disenfranchising" of the player by calling the GM (of all people) a "storyteller".

You know, it's thing like this that make me really wish I had the time to devote to properly grokking Dwarf Fortress, because sod the pictures, it's just a brilliant _story_.

"In principle, the pressure ought to be off, since you've got a infinitive lives and a stock of smart-bombs. In practice, the game quickly becomes so pulsingly busy that I not infrequently become blind to the position of my own ship. I'm still playing – still winning – but have no visual awareness of the bright white claw I'm actually steering. The bit of my brain that handles moving knows where it is, but the bit of my brain that does the thinking has no idea, and they very rapidly start screaming at each other." Margaret's new column for Gamasutra goes live (hurrah). Talking about this was one reason I got sucked back into Deadline very deeply a few weeks ago. Deep enough to edge beyond randomness, towards a semblence of mastery, and at least understand the system. At least enough to understand quite how fine it is.

This is great. Brandon is smart. And: when he says "story", he doesn't mean story. He just means "show me something new".

"Here's how important the music is: In all of the Halo games to date, Bungie has left out the option to turn the music off." Nice article on Marty O'Donnell's work for Bungie; I really enjoyed the shot of the "stripey room".

"But we have got the resources to save ourselves. General perception of games is jammed as masturbatory power-fantasy, sure, but the talent is hardly lacking. So let’s plea to them: we need a Joyce, or a Waste Land, or something you have to play with an abridged notes guide over your knee as you rip through it, something hardcore in its modernism that wants to make you work, make you sweat for its charms. We need cultural elitism to save ourselves." I am really, really enjoying Five Players at the moment.

Nice, detailed writeup of the process of designing Thunderstone (a dungeon-crawling, deck-building game a bit like Dominion).

"A week later, I went into Rockstar Games in Soho for the recording and screamed two hours of lines as Marshall Leigh Johnson. I threatened, chased, arrested, and killed people. I even died. I didn’t just die, I died with an accent. I was in the freaking zone. After signing my paperwork, I left, sweating, voiceless, and thrilled to bid farewell to my voice-over innocence. A new day had dawned for me and my badass larynx." This is brilliant, and doesn't go where you think it might. I love voice actors.

"This ghastly indie-art-game prose: it’s writing that tries to communicate ideas in the same way that game mechanics communicate ideas. Such writing offers allusions and suggestions, hints for the player to assemble, but it shies away from specifics or a through-line plot. Characters often go unnamed, or are named something thuddingly symbolic, or are Everyman. Theme is presented heavy-handedly (you wouldn’t want players to miss it!) and via the most cliché images. Expect frequent references to light and dark, cold and loneliness, broken hearts and shattered dreams. Memories may get a look in. Also death. It’s like reading a collage of the manuscripts sent to a high school poetry contest right after one of the students got in a fatal crash." Emily is right, and it's something I hate about certain games: just how *self-consciously* "indie" they are.

"While everyone else is going sleek and elegant and natural, Tiger is all experience points and loading screens and instant challenge pop-ups and club-tuning holodecks. Skate feels like skating, Fight Night feels like boxing, and Tiger feels like a game about golf." I don't like golf; I love computerised golf. I don't like Tiger; I love Links in all its forms, and before that, Leaderboard. This is a brilliant – if long – piece of writing on a short history of PC golf, and what's wrong with Tiger in this day and age. (Apart from, you know, the whole sex-addict thing).