"At a coffee shop near his office, Kazemi says he feels about his bots the way he imagines parents must feel about their children. “I’ve created these things, and they’re kind of separate from me now, and so I do feel kind of proud of them,” he says. “Every morning I wake up and I look at the last two hours of TwoHeadlines, and it just gets me every time.”" Yup. That.

"Under the [Do What You Love] credo, labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love (which is, in fact, most labor) is not only demeaned but erased. As in Jobs’ Stanford speech, unlovable but socially necessary work is banished from the spectrum of consciousness altogether." This is astute and good, on what happens when work is divided into either "things you love anyway" or "labor that we will banish from view" – and the enabling forces that let someone Do What They Love.

"…we though it would be it would be interesting to ask the students to deconstruct a logic prevalent in the games industry (F2P) and to then apply that logic to a real-world system (in this case, a London transport) service." I loved this when Kars first told me about the brief, and I love seeing it again now.

Great article from Jeff Minter on the journey from 70s vector art, 80s vector games, through to the (excellent) Tempest 2000 – including some great stuff on embracing the Jaguar's chips and instructions to make beautiful weirdness – and onwards through Nuon and Space Giraffe to TxK on the Vita. A really lovely balance in the article of coding voodoo, focusing on gameplay, and always wanting to make things both weirder and prettier. (Incidentally: I loved T2K when I first played it, but playing an original Tempest cab at Ground Kontrol was a special moment – striking how much a spinner changes that game). Definitely recommended.

"Houdini received this sort of letter every day, but Clayton Hutton's was different. Clayton Hutton was different. By accepting his challenge – by promising Clayton Hutton the considerable sum of £100 if the packing case in question defeated him – Houdini set in motion a strange chain of events that would, in a wonderfully mad and circuitous manner, impact the course of a vast global conflict that was at the time still 26 years away." Somebody please commission Christian to write a book? Soon? Thanks! (This is great).

"In another view, the "true Spelunky" is the live-streamed experience, both for broadcaster and spectator. Spelunky – as a concept, as an experience, as an entity — isn't just the game binary that you download onto your computer. It's also the Twitter banter about the game; it's the daily slog to get better at the game, slowly but surely, death after death; it's the communal effort to uncover new exploits and weird secrets; it's something that's equally "ours" as it is Mossmouth's. Spelunky, like any sport or game that matters — I mean really matters — is inseparable from the culture around it." Doug Wilson's analysis of Bananasaurus Rex's Solo Eggplant Run makes a great late contender for games writing of the year. It's precise, expert, and yet exciting, all at once; it demystifies and celebrates all at once. Great stuff.

This is a super-good article about developing generative music – though it's on a games site and one of the focuses is games, it also talks about generative piped music for buildings. And, notably, comments on the difference between a generative score and generative mixing. It's a great article, even if you're not into games.

"At last week’s Game Developers’ Conference I delivered a talk titled “AI-driven Dynamic Dialog”, describing the dialog system used in Left4Dead, Dota, and basically all of Valve’s games since The Orange Box." This is a brilliant talk – really worth going through the PDF for. In a nutshell, it's how the Left4Ddead conversation works – something I tried emulating with my Twitter bots a while back – but also sheds light on how I could have sped up some of the decision-making code on Hello Lamp Post. It's also good on what designing (andwriting) for this kind of work looks like. Might have to write something longer on this.

"I like co-op games where the other player gets a beer, not a second controller, but can still be utterly pivotal to the outcome of a game." Yes, that, and indeed, all of this lovely post from Margaret. I should return to FTL – I played a lot of it last year, and loved it, even if it mainly was a game about seeing how quickly somebody would asphyxiate when the Oxygen Machine blew up. Again. Sigh.

"The best lectures are also full of what the Elizabethans called ‘lively turning’ – strange juxtapositions, leaps of thought, rhetorical tricks, jokes and the element of surprise." Very true – a nice piece by Joe Moran on lecturing in the MOOC age.

Ah, the joys – and pains – of finding what looks like a software bug… lies in hardware.

Won't lie: nearly had a little sniff at Marie's presentation during Playful 2013; a love letter to a town in Animal Crossing, and also to London. Safe travels, Marie!

Ben on postboxes as boundary objects – with a nice map from Hello Lamp Post, indicating how the boxes were talked to, and suitable name-checks to The Crying of Lot 49.