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"With a recent project, we really started utilizing extensions with named_scope which is very powerful and cleaned up our code considerably." Some really nice examples of using named_scope effectively.
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"Nintendo makes money with the hardware alone, which may be a superior business model." What, making profit on units rather than selling them at colossal loss is a *superior* business model? Who would have thought it!
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Long thread of patched and hacked 8-bit and 16-bit ROMs, some bringing a vast amount of customisation.
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You're a little robot. You're also indestructible. Use bombs to bounce yourself around the level, but don't run out. Lovely little flash game.
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In which an entertaining man plays a hacked, super-hard Super Mario map, swears at his TV a lot, and still manages to be pretty good at it. It's a nice illustration of the problem-solving process, and it's rather funny. "This is worse than Panic At The Disco. This is worse than Ann Coulter."
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"The No Game is a party game with only one real rule."
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This looks like it could be interesting/fun; if anything, worth watching as a slightly more attractive option for lifestreaming…
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"Sequel Pro is the perfect tool for working with database-driven websites and applications." Leopard-only MySQL management application; forked out of the long-neglected CocoaMySQL.
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I need to think on this more; there's a lot of meat in it, and some interesting commentary, but suggesting that "the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting things" I find somewhat insulting. I'm frustrated because it feels like Blow is pushing for people to find the "correct" interpretation, rather than any valid criticism they can back up. Still, there's also some excellent stuff in here, but it's the first thing he's said that's rubbed me the wrong way a little (and I'm not just talking about the 'bullshit' comment).
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"I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic." Fantastic article about Jim Jannard and his Red digital movie-camera business.
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Brilliant, brilliant little advert.
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"VideoGamesHero brings you homebrew action at it's best – offering lasting fun and challenging action with over 65 Songs, 5 Game modes, Motion Card and Guitar Grip support, there is something for everyone!" Homebrew Harmonix-style rhythm action game for the ds. Awesome.
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"In this extensive interview, Yasuhara outlines his carefully constructed theories of fun and game design, including the differences between American and Japanese audiences, with illustrated documents." Lots of nice things in here, including a section on "tidying up".
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"APIdock is a web app that provides a rich and usable interface for searching, perusing and improving the documentation of projects that are included in the app." Handy.
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"I think the role of the architecture diagram, user flow, and wireframe belongs very much after the fact, after we’ve sketched and prototyped an experience. Those are tools to document what has been agreed through sketching and prototyping. They are not the best means for solving challenging design problems." That seems like a good way of putting it.
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"In this template you'll find shared layers (masters) for a title page, wireframe, wireframe/storyboard hybrid, simple storyboard, and storyboard with notes. Column guides and a regular grid make it easy to use and keep your layout tight." Nice .graffle templates for UX designers.
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Timelapse, merged photographs of videogames. Beautiful, especially Tempest.
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"Being able to go back and fix your mistakes is not the same as being forgiven for them. Maybe that’s what all those storybooks were trying to tell us." Lovely.
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"If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while." Merlin Mann is very sensible.
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"It seems to me that Tim and the nameless characters of the epilogue represent archetypes of some kind. They don’t stand in for every man and woman, certainly, but they’re emblematic of a certain kind of dysfunctional relationship, one where “I’ll protect you” turns into “I’ll control you.”" A smart, sharp reading of Braid, that understands its gameiness.
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"The mouse is a continuous pointing device; the finger is discontinuous. That’s a profound difference that I wish I were able to clearly understand and explain." PPK on how MobileSafari responds to Javascript's mouse actions.
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"I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think _because_ they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you." John Walker on the problem with BioWare's attitude to morality, and some potential solutions.
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"Opentape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player."
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"I've heard that Japanese developers, who have traditionally held American game development in low esteem, have a great deal of respect for Bungie, and you can understand why. Bungie has done for shooters what Nintendo did for platformers: they've turned the visceral joys control and motion into the centerpiece of the game."
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"Thomas Finchum, an American diver competing in Beijing, describes the view from the 10-meter platform at the Water Cube." Incredible, interactive panorama from the top board in the Water Cube.
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"Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture." And this is the trick to make the little bits look like part of a whole. Lovely talk from Mike at UXWeek.
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"One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates… It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition."
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"I don't begrudge Blow an attempt at addressing important historical events, but the weight of the atomic age seems too much to address with a few lines of text that feel incongruous with the rest of the production." This is, I think, a worthwhile point. I'll be returning to the whole "atomic bomb" question in a blogpost soon, I hope.
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"Given that Valve is being forced to charge for the update, they wanted to ensure that 360 owners were getting their money's worth." Such a shame they have to charge for it – but still, more TF2 on 360, and that's a good thing from my perspective.
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A nice simple explanation of what using Git is really like.
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"What the hell is wrong with me? There are a lot of ways to win at Civilization Revolution that do not involve taking a happy, peaceful city and reducing it to a smoldering gravesite filled with radioactive trinitite." Clive Thompson on a case of Walter Mitty syndrome.
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"Keldon Jones has published an artificial intelligence opponent for the game Blue Moon with an user interface written with GTK+ toolkit. This is a native Mac OS 10.5 version of the game written with Cocoa, so there's no need to install X11 and GTK+ libraries. It runs straight out of the box (on Leopard)." Heck yes.
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"This is a write-up of my diploma project in interaction design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project is entitled ‘Adventures in Urban Computing’ and this weblog post contains a brief project description and a pdf of the diploma report." Well worth a read, and beautifully presented. I need to chew over this more.
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"It's a shame to me that a game with Braid's narrative, artistic, and aesthetic aspirations is inaccessible to so many people hungry for exactly those things." Yes. Much as I adore it, Braid can be awful hard at times. A smart game for smart gamers, alas.
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"A popular misconception about agile is that it doesn’t allow for plans. This isn’t true. Agile focuses on the activity of planning rather than focusing on a fixed plan."
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WikkaWiki is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine∞ written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.
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"The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme." Looks great.
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Now that's what I call a UI. Nice idea!
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"Are you tired of browser-based games that are thinly veiled interfaces for databases? Finally, there's a game that just is a database!" This looks awesome.
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"A simple pocket knife can be more appealing and usable than a bristling Victorinox, and a dedicated little games machine like the DS can engage us far more than the sleek power of the PSP. You can feel admiration and even awe for the big power boxes, but for the DS you feel affection – and that, in marketing terms, is worth a whole heap more." I love Stephen Fry.
It’s taken a long while to put together, mainly because I wanted to write up my very sketch notes into something approximating what I said, and also because I wanted to experiment with a more representative way of publishing presentations online.
Anyhow, I’m very pleased to share Playing Together: What Games Can Learn From Social Software with you.
It went down pretty well at both NLGD and Develop, and I really enjoyed some of the thinking that went into it. I’m working out what to do about that, obviously, but in the meantime, I thought it deserved a wider audience. Do enjoy, and I’d love to hear your feedback on it.
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"Anecdotal feedback also confirmed that without exception, the PSP was regarded as the best sales presenter ever received. As a result, Foster’s is now reviewing further rollout of the tool." Fosters use a pre-loaded PSP as sales demonstration tool; it does very well.
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"Each world has a specific mechanic and overlapping rarely occurs between world mechanics. Instead, the player is given just enough objects on the screen to solve the puzzle with the limited tools available. By being able to concentrate on one mindset of solving the puzzle, eventually the solutions make themselves apparent." A nice Manveer Heir piece on why the puzzles themselves in Braid are good: because the game creates complexity out of limited tools, rather than throwing every mechanic in all the time.
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An interesting series of concept images of what context-aware, mobile search and data-diving tools might look like. Some neat thinking around transparency and context.
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"I wanted to take portraits of people that would reveal a hidden part of their character. So I had them play videogames."
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"Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun. It's an RPG." Of course. Fantastic deconstruction from Clive Thompson.
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Braid papercraft. Delightful.
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Eesh. Tetris in 500 bytes of Javscript and HTML. Yes, they're obfuscated and unpleasant, but wow, etcetera.
Sometimes, the game changes
18 August 2008
I wrote a response in a comment on Leigh Alexander’s post at Sexy Videogameland on the “Four Month Bell-curve”, and felt it only fair to reproduce it here, given it’s touching on some ideas I’ve been batting around for a while. And, also, because back before we had comments, we used to respond to each other like this.
Well, sometimes the problem [with the drop-off in interest after you play a game after launch] is that the game changes.
With GTAIV, there are three phases to the player’s relationship with the city. To begin with, you have the shock-of-the-new: a whole world you’re washed up in, lost, just like Niko. You empathise with how lost Niko is, and you slowly learn to love Liberty City.
The second phase is feeling like you fit in – you know the shortcuts, you don’t always need the GPS, and you take pride in every minute you shave off journey time. This is what it felt like a while after moving to London – I felt native, rather than fumbling around like a tourist.
And then you hit this final phase, where you’re no longer even thinking about the neat shortcuts; you’re just picking up the mission, going where you gotta go.
That’s just commuting. And GTAIV turns into commuting about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through, really. I still love the city, but man, it feels like work.
I’ve recently started World of Warcraft, and bits of that game turn into commuting very, very fast – even though I’m still going “wow” at all the new locations my friends charge through.
I don’t know; I think there’s something about the higher fidelity that makes me concentrate on the artifice to begin with, and only when I tire of the artifice is the game stripped back to raw mechanics.
To use your Sonic example – the distance between the raw mechanic and the artifice is much smaller than say, in GTAIV or Bioshock – and so the “commuting” phase never really kicks in. The game is so focused on making you enjoy the act of being in it, stripping away unnecessary walking between Acts or menu interfaces… it’s an easy game not to tire of. By contrast, I find I tire of games more easily than I used to.
But there’s still joy to be had going back. I went back to Bioshock a few weeks ago and have ploughed through the final 75% of the game – and am about to finish it. I’m really enjoying it, and I think being a way from the hype cycle has helped that. I’m looking forward to doing the same to GTA in the near future.
And, in the meantime, I’ve found staying out of the bellcurve – the hype cycle, if you like – has helped me enjoy games like never before. It’s lovely to be surprised by a new game – something we miss out on a lot now.