-
This is working well for me: rapid calendar input, not too big on the menu bar, and yet nice support for multiple calendars and the like. Pretty much meets my calendar-input requirements, and leaves iCal to do the heavy lifting.
-
"Johann Sebastian Joust! is a no-graphics wiimote dueling game prototype for 3+ players. We developed it at the Nordic Game Jam 2011." Fun: electronically-enabled, no-screen gaming, which in this case is primarily about putting other players off and interfering with their controls.
Noticings
28 August 2009
One of my challenges to myself for 2009 was to make a game.
I bang on about them enough on here, and in the real world, but I’ve never actually made a game – at least, not one anyone else has ever played. I decided that needed to change. And now it has.
Noticings is live. What’s Noticings? Well, the about page explains it pretty well:
Noticings is a game about learning to look at the world around you.
Cities are wonderful places, and everybody finds different things in them. Some of us like to take pictures of interesting, unusual, or beautiful things we see, but many of use are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don’t take in the things around us.
Noticings is a game you play by going a bit slower, and having a look around you. It doesn’t require you change your behaviour significantly, or interrupt your routine: you just take photographs of things that you think are interesting, or things you see. You’ll get points for just noticing things, and you might get bonuses for interesting coincidences.
You play Noticings with a camera, Flickr, a single tag, and making sure your photographs are geotagged. That’s it. There are no points for value judgments or aesthetic opinion; there’s no win-condition (though you might temporarily be top of a leaderboard for the past seven days, or for a neighbourhood, or for a city).
Tom and I had batted around the idea of some kind of game like this for quite a while, and it went through several different phases of complexity and big-design-up-front, showing it to select friends who had smart ideas, and thinking about how to Get It Done and perhaps get paid for it.
And then we threw most of that out of the window (for now) and just made the damn thing work. It went live with one simple rule: you get ten points for a noticing. Then we invited some friends – many of whom have been playing this game for years without knowing it – and waited to see what would happen.
There’s some elegant engineering that means it’s dead easy to roll out new rules, which we’re doing, slowly, along with changes to the code and the site. Some of the forthcoming rules will be obvious; some might be curveballs. We might not tell you about everything up front. You might have to challenge yourself a little to get the more interesting bonuses. We might change everything in a bit.
It’s fun working on a game whilst people play it, and for now, we make no apologies for the work-in-progress state.
And it’s fun to start seeing the world with a slightly different lens; seeing something that might be a good noticing, or recognising something you’ve seen in the game that you want the bonus points for re-noticing. I’m getting much more diligent about uploading cameraphone pictures; I’m getting much less precious about my photostream; I’m taking more pictures as a result. It’s interesting to see a game that encourages you to see patterns and collect the world in photographs, much as Martin Parr or Tom Phillips have done. It’s fun to see more of the city around you.
So, a work in progress. And: it now needs more people to join in. We took the temporary password off this morning, and now, anyone can join in. You can play anywhere in the world – we’ll be doing some interesting stuff around places, I hope, to make it easier to see stuff that’s near you (rather than just all over the place) – and we’ll see how it goes. You might also want to follow the Noticings blog, where we’ll keep people updated with new rules as they happen, and changes to the game.
It’s 2009, and I’m working on a game, and it’s already making me very happy. Let’s see what happens next.
-
"LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua." And it all looks rather pretty, too. Must investigate further!
-
danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.
-
"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.
-
"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.
-
"This is not intended to be a fun game. It has all the trappings of a LEGO game. It has the forgiving game mechanics. The ease of control. But it uses these elements to create a cognitive dissonance between the ease of the actions and the terrible nature of their real world counterparts." Corvus hypothesises what A Lego Clockwork Orange might look like. Thoughtful stuff.
-
"So why not embrace it? That's why You Have To Burn The Rope is fantastic… for games to become art there must be an awareness and a conversation with its own history. Film, music, and literary critic call this allusion, but for the creators, this isn't just a word, it's a dialogue. Which means it should invite participants. For me, I'm far more intrigued by stop-motion artist Patrick Boivin's attempt at turning a linked sequence of videos into Youtube Street Fighter." I'm not sure I agree with Wang on YHTBTR, specifically, but this paragraph is reasonably sensible.
-
65 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad, this LJ post shows photographs from the late 1940s merged with images of the location in the present. All are striking; some are very sad. Great contextualisation, though.
-
"…then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended [Arthur C Clarke's metaphor]: 'Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage.'" Excellent summary of what sounds like a wonderful GDC Austin keynote from Bruce Sterling.
-
"'What we've done in MMOs and what we tend to lean toward is building an enviroment for the new player to explore that is essentially a safe environment… the newbie zone. For our explorative learners, we've given them safe zones to explore.' But that doesn't work for imitative learners." Excellent article on styles of learning, with particular attention to how MMOs teach players game mechanics.
-
"Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account." 4chan members get into Sarah Palin's barely-disguised Yahoo mail accounts which she used for business.
-
Oh boy.
-
“I decided to create Flatshare fridge because there is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat,” he says. “At the time, I was living in such a flat!” Amazing.
-
"It occurred to me that if I could somehow tether a DSLR to an instant-on device like an Arduino microcontroller I would have less weight to carry around and could get more work done. After mentally spec’ing out what I would need, I realized the solution was right in front of me – because I bring it with me for Mario Kart wireless races on long night jobs – (In the manner of John Lasseter’s slow epiphany voice): “Use-the-Nintendo-D-S.” Duh." Oh wow.
-
Soulja Boy reviews Braid. Oh dear. (Although: much as I want to mock it, he is correct that time-rewind mechanics are, usually, a lot of fun in and of themselves. But still.)