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"But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.
And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve." So much good thinking in this post from Frank Lantz
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"Once everyone got on-board with "anyone can make video games", then the weird leap in logic was, "who wouldn't want to make video games," and worse, "who wouldn't want to solely live off their video games?"" This is all lovely from Robert – especially noting that making art is not incompatible with, separately, working, and that creative endeavours do not have to be our sole life's work. (And: that doing things not full-time does not devalue them in the slightest!)
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Fantastic: a real-world traffic engineer explains how he plans roads and transit in Cities:Skylines.
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"Its weird really. You’re standing there in front of something, perhaps its an ancient artefact, buried for thousands of years – perhaps its a mummy, partially unwrapped. A real human being, you can see their face from all those years ago, see how they lived, what they ate. History, right there… But whatev’s. Look! There’s a telly over there!" Yep.
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Brian Sutton-Smith has died; this is a solid – and impressive – obituary.
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JS/webGL sculpting app. Nifty.
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"So many traditions of art-making like music, painting, or carpentry, all involve some sense of rejecting formalist intellectualizing in favor of just… "doing." Try to take joy in doing, collaborate with your computer, embrace messiness." Great stuff from Robert Yang.
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Wonderful interview with Tim Hunkin. Such a lovely chap, and so shrewd.
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A bunch of Packers players are really, really into Catan. It's quite a sweet story, really.
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All of this is brilliant: fun, skilled, eloquent, a great crowd cheering somebody on. Also: I hadn't realised how hardcore the arcade Tetris games ("Grandmaster") had got. Blimey.
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Quake, rendered in wireframe, spat out as audio and into an oscilloscope. Wow. (The wibbly-wobbly wireframe jitter is beautiful, if you ask me.)
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"When Smith describes the raids as “linear,” which allows the developers to “build on your knowledgebase,” he’s really describing something profound in the context of Destiny: the Vault of Glass is a game, where Destiny overall is merely a series of loops." Oh, that's a good way of putting it. (This is a strong article about one of the most interesting parts of Destiny – its first Raid. The Kirk Hamilton interview linked off it is excellent, too.)