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This is remarkably detailed.
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"“[Ive] has good taste.” He paused. “But more important than good taste, he has the ability to” — he points to the MacBook Air in front of me — “he’s true to the materials, to the medium he’s working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it’s doing things that aren’t true to the hardware.”"
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"I think that the physical and the digital are inseparable in culture in the same way that waves and particles are inseparable in light." This is great, and reminds me how Berger-esque some of James' art-writing is getting.
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"In [Nude] she was always sorry for the clumsy pins, and the uneven parting in her hair. But Edward Weston regretted the shadow on her right arm, which spoiled the symmetry of her body curving like an architectural form or a tree, or like a curling wave on the coast, lines as lovely as any in Nature. To her lasting astonishment, he had glorified her." I love Economist obituaries, and this one – of Charis Wilson – is no exception. Lovely.
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"All the characters fom Home Alone, the project starts on the 22nd." 22 Twitterbots, performing Home Alone, in realtime, starting Dec 22nd. Awesome. Bonkers, but awesome (and takes the concept I used in Twit 4 Dead to a new level).
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"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.
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"I'm sorry to say that Demiforce is canceling plans for Onyx." This is a real shame, because I was somewhat excited that Demiforce wasn't just ramping up for "another game", and was instead building something that might benefit the platform. As it is: oh well. Those Apple T&Cs are killer, it seems.
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"I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like." And then, 18 pages of wonderful gaming oral history; you'll be smelling the aircon and the chewing gum by the time you're through with this thread.
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"The aim, then, is to explore what makes a good children's game, to consider how this oft-maligned market can sometimes reveal bad game design habits that we've been conditioned to tolerate, and to offer a guide to the best games for kids available now by looking at the four design areas that I believe are key to making a successful game for children." Dan Whitehead's roundup of games for children is really very good: some strong thinking, good comparative analysis, and best of all, parental insight. More like this, please, EG.
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Wonderful interview with Marty Stratton and John Carmack on Quake Live; there's some really smart insight on development and business in here, and also some tidbits of Carmack talking code. Definitely one to mull over.
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Jolly good – easy to configure and get going, nice templating, and fast, because it's based on a databased index. Also, it looks like it's very actively maintained. Now added to this blog!
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"Are all these industries in such terminal decline that they’re grasping around for any revenue stream or way out? Or is this the converged future, where business and culture are one and the same? Not only can’t I tell whether things are real or marketing vehicles any more, I can’t even determine what’s being marketed." Chris has a point.
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Which is the sensible way to do things, and this feels about right.
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The title says it all. Proper good, especially the sheer volume of A Lot Of Guys With Drums, and the way the brass replace some of the keyboard and bass parts.
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"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.
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"After a sixteen year wait, one of the most highly acclaimed radio programmes of the nineties, featuring a uniquely talented combination of acclaimed comedy writers and actors, will finally be released in 2008." Oh, yes please.
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It doesn't get much more niche; long-suffering Prinny finally gets a break from being tossed around and exploding and given his own game. The first trailer is mainly about how much Nippon Ichi exploit him in their office. It's like one big in-joke… and it's getting properly localized! NIS are good to us, dood.
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Some interesting user research, especially when it comes to understandings of the device, and perceptions of the App Store. It's amazing how people's attitude to price changes when you've got a small screen, a market saturated with cheap goods, and a product that isn't in a box.
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Just so beautiful. Now: I just need a video of it rotating on loop, please.
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"[The modern supervillain's] hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile phone…. for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam employed to support character and storytelling." The network as fortress and ideology all at once.
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Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.
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"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.
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"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.
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Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.
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"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.
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"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.
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"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.
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"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.
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"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).
Far Cry: Instincts and viral social networks
03 October 2005
So at the weekend I picked up Far Cry: Instincts. It’s a very good game – pushes the Xbox graphically in ways you couldn’t dream (trumping even Riddick) and has a great fun set of multiplayer modes.
What’s really interesting, though, is that it has an excellent mapmaker. Far from letting you just move around tiles, it lets you mould terrain, build structures, and plan complex maps – and then play them online with your friends. It’s been really well designed – the controls are superbly mapped to the Xbox pad. It still takes a while to make a map, but it’s not tricky to make some quite complex ones.
Anyhow. When you’ve made a map, you “publish” it – this doesn’t upload it anywhere, it just seems to verify it with your online name (Gamertag, in Xbox parlance). And then you can host games with your friends, with your map. They will, of course, have to download it from you, but that takes a few minutes, and then everyone can play.
Here’s where it gets clever. When they come to host a game, they’ll find your map – which they just downloaded – is on their list of maps. So they can host a game with the map you created. And if it’s a good map, they may well do.
And so then everyone they play with gets to use your map. And so, if you’ve created something really good, it’s going to spread virally very quickly; players will say “this map is good, man, you should play it”. At its logical conclusion, as many people will have your map as the ones the game comes with, and then you’ve entered canon. Wheras PC games (which are usually very moddable) have a distribution network of the Internet, Xbox games don’t have the same freedom for downloading new content. So Ubisoft should be applauded for letting the players become one big viral network, in which they ‘catch’ maps off one another.
The game’s online implementation has the customary Ubisoft online flaws, but in terms of how easy it is to make brand new content – and, more to the point, how easy it is for that content to propagate based purely on merit – it’s really something special. I can’t wait to see what happens when the map-makers get really good…