"On the last day of tutoring, I asked my 15-year-old student if he knew that he had a chance to woo and win Bastila. “Really?” He thought he’d known everything about the game, but the dialogue option never registered as flirtation. His face, usually so focused with youthful liveliness, grew wary. He frowned and blinked. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his beloved game would contain something so foreign. So adult. " Marie Mutsuki Mockett – what a name! – writes about KOTOR, Carth Onassi, and a little bit of magic.

"The alien tripods are decimating the city with ion cannons. Wild one-eyed dog-pigs with irritatingly high voices are roaming the streets, mutilating the populace with their fire breath, doing their best to keep their pet radioactive zombies in check. Meanwhile, you – the only one who can do anything to stop this genocide – are in stuck in a medical pod, being instructed by some asshole lab assistant on how to move your head up and down." Hardcasual don't like tutorials.

"It boils Digital Britain down to three Ms – media, music and movies – myopically ignoring the pioneers of new technology, and ?
showing a blind spot for all creativity outside the so-called creative industries… Instead of empowering digital Britons, the bill follows the lead of music and movie corporations, who already apply a presumption of guilt to their customers. Instead of treating the web as a platform of possibilities, it recasts it as a tool for mass theft." Excellent, excellent leader from the Guardian on the frankly scandalous digital economy bill.

"…maybe this is the best of both worlds. An audience that, having crossed the barriers to entry, is by its nature more invested in our work; a public profile by which we have the means to occasionally reach into the mass consciousness, but which affords us the freedom to continue experimenting with subject, form, and style; an industry which is truly international; which is capable of producing both multi-million dollar blockbusters and single-creator labors of love (and releasing both on the same platform); which manages to be neither too big nor too small, and is the more vital, unique and exhilarating for it. We are a medium for us, and while there are more and more of us every day, we'll never be for everyone. In a way, that's beautiful." I think Steve's about right.

"In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it. By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (”stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go." Tom Francis gets the gnome achievement in L4D2, and lives to tell the tale.

"I did a set of four walks in Austria; two long ones, two short ones. I did some "daystreaming" where using bits of technology I was updating my location, status and pictures as I walked." Ambient information gathering, whilst taking in the outdoors, and all for charity. Lovely.

And it just worked first time. Awesome!

"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Eco on lists.

"Today, the UK government's Department For Transport unveils a new browser-based MMOG, created by New York-based developer Area/Code. Designed for early teenagers to learn principles of traffic safety, it's probably the largest 'serious games' project ever to be created for the UK. Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body… We spoke to Lantz, Slavin and Simon Williams, who led the project at Carat, the Department For Transport's media agency, about what Code Of Everand is, how they pulled it off, and why they think it could prove that games can be a powerful platform for learning." Edge interview.

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.

It's a digital clock made out of scrollbars; divs being resized to force overflow and generate a scrollbar make up the seven-segment display. Bonkers.

"Using a simple correlation scale comparing marketing spend and sales against Metacritic rating and sales, Divnich found that marketing influenced game revenue “three times more than game scores”… “There is no compelling reason to focus on quality, you should literally just spend that money and time on marketing.”" I'm not sure he's suggesting this is a /good/ thing, but he is pointing out that it's what the numbers say. It's still depressing.

"Tommy, I appreciate you. You do so much for me. You make an excellent vegetable chili. And that time I was on a trip for work and you caught that mouse all on your own, you were really brave. On the flip side, Nick, Coach and your brother Ellis, they offer the security of a well-oiled killing machine. We cover each other. We share health packs. And we don’t cook vegetable chili."

"SoI think it's not unreasonable to read that the article is presenting the stance that the evolution of the status of games from 'toys and entertainment' to 'art' is fundamentally linked to the idea of authorship coming from the singular creative vision of an individual. For the record, I strongly disagree with this stance – and furthermore, I feel it is treacherous ground in which to plant the 'games are henceforth art' flag, as I suspect it is ground that will quickly be lost to (or surrendered by) the first generation of artists who even attempt to question it (in fact – for those of us 'in the know' it has been and continues to be, questioned all the time)."

"…sometimes I fear our endless preoccupation with making the case for video games is self-defeating. It feels defensive and, at its worst, produces a kind of micro-culture obsession with analysis: a 24/7 bloggo-Twitter tilling and re-tilling of the same small plot of dirt. In this self-absorbed environment, each new game's worth is measured by its ability to move the needle on emergent narrative, artistic expression, genre refinement…or whatever criterion we're applying this week to prove games matter to people already convinced." Yes. Not the reason I've been taking a break from writing about it, but something that plays on my mind before I put fingers to keyboard.

Really interesting interview on game localisation and translation, with lots of examples; from Euldamos, an academic journal on games.

"Eons ago, in 1996, Next Generation magazine asked me for a list of game design tips for narrative games. Here’s what I gave them. Reading it today, some of it feels dated (like the way I refer to the player throughout as “he”), but a lot is as relevant as ever. I especially like #8 and #9." Jordan Mechner is a smart chap; nice to know he was on the right lines so long ago.

"A rain-proof planetarium machine could be installed in public, anchored to the plinth indefinitely. Lurking over the square with its strange insectile geometries, the high-tech projector would rotate, dip, light up, and turn its bowed head to shine the lights of stars onto overcast skies above. Tourists in Covent Garden see Orion's Belt on the all-enveloping stratus clouds—even a family out in Surrey spies a veil of illuminated nebulae in the sky." This is lovely, though no idea if it'd, you know, work.

"Noticings is possibly one of the first services to integrate the Yahoo Geoplanet Data deeply". Tom explains how we're using Geoplanet inside Rails. Really good stuff if you're interested in that geo malarkey

"if the Choose Your Own Adventure books are just another Finite State Machine, it should be possible to use some of the same techniques to examine their structure." And so begins a lovely, lovely post on data visualisation, and what visualisation can tell us about the changing editorial strategy of CYOA books. Be sure to check out the "animations" at the top of the page. It's all very beautiful.

"A game with almost no visual component, but one that turns the tilt, shake, touch, and even GPS location of an iPhone into “knobs” on a radio that can be used to “tune in” to conversations taking place elsewhere in the timestream… literally a radio that listens to the future. As players learn how to navigate a landscape they cannot see but only hear, their powers expand to include the capture and release of key audible moments, which they will use to change the future AND unravel a mystery that spans more than a hundred years." This is the high concept pitch, but I'm excited to see how it turns out. Interactive audio drama seems a great fit for the device.