"…hard-core players are comfortable mentally manipulating Peggle's complex physics. They can build models about where the ball is going to go, even after the seventh or eight collision. A frustrated casual gamer looks at Peggle and sees chaos; a hard-core one sees causality." Oh – now that _is_ an interesting way to look at things.

This is great: a 25-minute video from Blurst looking at a short prototype they built. During the retrospective, other members of the team question the designers/developers about their intentions, their goals, and examine ways to make the prototype into a better game. There's some good questioning, some nice explanation, and it's a great insight into a process built around rapid prototyping and execution on top of Unity. Interesting to see how another company work on rapid prototypes and then try to "find the fun". Also: making the prototype public is another great piece of explanatory work.

Lovely interview with Dylan Cuthbert, of Pixeljunk, about some of the design processes behind the Pixeljunk games.

"A frequent question people ask us is “how do I transfer my database between my local workstation and my Heroku app?”" The answer is: using taps. Database push/pull, to/from Heroku, and to/from different database vendors. Very, very clever.

Almost Atari 2600-era platforming, but with a couple of (big) twists. Compulsive, and cross-platform, it's almost definitely worth an hour of your day.

"Starting a new column reprinting classic Game Developer magazine articles, this January 1994 premiere issue article goes behind the scenes of Id Software's Doom, talking to John Carmack and revealing technical specifics of the seminal game's creation." And it's cracking – lots of great detail, some neat ironies, and quite a bit about the id team's fondness for NeXT workstations.

Consolevania is over. A shame, but they make their case well, and it was lovely when it lasted.

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"Your argument did not address my own, but nice try". I think I'm going to need this in future.

These are lovely. The more I think about this, the more I like his Die Hard poster.

"The purpose of this analysis is to determine the evolution of gravity in the Mario video game series as video game hardware increases." Not super-accurate, but not bad; the bit when it starts the comparison against GPU word length is a little silly, perhaps. But otherwise: fun!

It's bonkers. Tiny pixel art, incredible procedural animation for limbs, massive menus, it's like Worms and Soldner (was it Soldner?) and loads of other things all rolled into one. And they're still working on it.

The results are now out. No surprises that Soundless Mountain II wins, but nice to see a late entry from the entertainingly Crush pastiche, "Squish". In Squish, a 2D game gets flattened to a 1D game at the touch of a button! Brilliant.

"I used to scoff at paying a premium for jeans that come with holes in them already. Then I saw just how much work goes into distressing jeans, and I realized that these people are artists."

"The main screen of the application. All operations are performed using this screen." And you can tell, you know. What a UI!

…and then a massive anonymous slagging-match and name-calling session begins in the comments. Some reasonable commentary in amongst a lot of mud-slinging about the state of EALA…

"Take the hassle out of organising football". It's been done before, but perhaps the brand, mobile experience, and quality of product will win out for Nike's team-management app. They showed us the MMO with Nike+; now they're doing guild management for the masses.

"In essence, the in-game physics cooked up by Pure's designers isn't merely a matter of being realistic or unrealistic. The physics is evocative, creating your worldview within the game, and even metaphoric: When you play Pure, you realize that physics is one of the truly artistic elements of an action title." Yes! Spot on, Clive Thompson.

"These concepts are not complicated by Cern standards. We are entering a zone which is weaponised to boggle."

Simple, straightforward, pretty much correct.

Yes, this is going to come in handy.

"This javascript function can then read in the current content of the text area, format it using a trimmed down version of textile, and then set the content of a DIV with the resulting HTML. The end result of all this is live comment preview, with textile formatting." Live textile preview functionality.

"Trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact. … Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar." Why games don't always need tangible villains.

A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.

"It's just an Nintendo in a toaster, but I like it."

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.

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."

"The No Game is a party game with only one real rule."

This looks like it could be interesting/fun; if anything, worth watching as a slightly more attractive option for lifestreaming…

"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.

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).

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

"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."

"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.

"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.

"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."