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"As editorial director of Ladybird Books, Douglas Keen, who has died aged 95, was responsible for the first experience of reading of millions of children." Myself included; I learned to read with Peter, Jane, and my Mum, sitting on my bedroom floor each morning.
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Amazingly, a few in here I didn't know – "move selection" and "delete only whitespace" for starters.
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"I call this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. Covering both commercial and non-commercial games from the earliest arcade games through contemporaty titles, I look at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. The book reflects both theoretical and game-design goals." Add to cart.
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"I won’t rant about how our tax dollars pay for these images and how we deserve better. But what I do find alarming is that these documents are used to brief major decision makers. These decision makers may know a thing or two about policy and politics, but if decoding and understanding the armed forces budget is the goal of these documents, then there is a huge failure here." Datafail and slidecrime, all under one roof.
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"The true orator is one whose practice of citizenship embodies a civic ideal – whose rhetoric, far from empty, is the deliberate, rational, careful organiser of ideas and argument that propels the state forward safely and wisely. This is clearly what Obama, too, is aiming to embody: his project is to unite rhetoric, thought and action in a new politics that eschews narrow bipartisanship. Can Obama's words translate into deeds?" Nice article on rhetoric and oratory. Cicero really is quite the writer, you know; ages since I've read him, but this brings it all back.
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"When the mechanics are broken there – no matter what great ingredients or designs you had – the dish disappoints. Execution is very much part of the analysis there – as is service, mis-en-scene. Food is never evluated (in the Guide Micheline sense) out of context… but the mechanics are fundamental to everything else." Robin Hunicke on another parallel to games criticism; I think she might be onto something, and it's another good contribution to the mound of Mirrors' Edge coverage.
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"Though few gamers might be interested in long haul trucking, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on a small group of gamers and offering them the best experience they can get within their limited requirements. In fact, the more MMO developers who realize this—that a small group of loyal players is better than a huge group of disinterested players—the better, honestly." Very true – a nice conclusion to Matthew Kumar's round-up of a somewhat niche – but interesting sounding – browser MMO.
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"The moisturiser, far from the trusted friend and counsellor of the first reading, is The Picture of Dorian Gray." Alex tries to read that Nivea ad that's all over stations right now. It is confusing.
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"We think it's one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century." Awesome. This is why kids go into engineering.
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"Maps, databases and other resources that help you dig deeper." A shame the raw data isn't available, but great they're collating this stuff and seeing it as another channel of news they provide.
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"A favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, Rogue popularized the dungeon crawling computer game dating back from 1980 (and spawned entire class of derivatives known collectively as "roguelikes"). gandreas software now presents the classic for the iPhone/iPod Touch." Oh god, Rogue for the iPhone. Unusual gestural interface, but it's a perfect port, and brings back memories of being 7 all over again. Needless to say, I installed it immediately.
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"The problem with remakes and ports for the critic, especially those of old beloved games, is emotional baggage. It's difficult to give a cold, measured critique of something you've loved since childhood. How can you give an objective appraisal when every time you hear the game's start-up melody your mind soaks happy in memories of warm endless school holidays, and that delicious, pure, all-encompassing escapism unique to children who play videogames? This game's story is also a part of my story, so it's impossible to get much distance between the two." A lovely paragraph in Simon's review of the DS Chrono Trigger re-release.
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"Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play. There are no right or wrong answers; there are many ways to solve every puzzle." Sounds gorgeous; looks beautiful. So much loveliness.
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"I still consider glass to be an extreme craft – you’re working with and fighting gravity and momentum in those 60 seconds before it starts to harden – but you learn to take your time, even if there are lots of moments of extreme concentration to keep a piece from disintegrating." Chris writes up his glass-blowing course; sounds great.
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"Perhaps the problem is that we so deeply rely on reference points like film, which require stories progressing over time, when we could be referring to things like sculpture or painting, which require no timescale and people find just as moving." Some good thoughts from Jonathan Blow; I think his point about games' unique ability to challenge is an important one.
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"Rohrer is trying to make art in a medium that most people don't even think is capable of art. He can create this space of pure freedom, as artists have done in the past — isolation, introspection, ascetic poverty. But ultimately he has to send these works out into the world, and people have to respond to them. And right now the audience doesn't know what to do with them." Fantastic writing from Esquire; mature, sensible, and at no point apologist.
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"The 'better sequel' mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don't want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I'm willing to blunder through if I'm going to get an experience I never had before." And this is why I've been sticking with it; I think Keith is on the right lines with this quotation.
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I really like the dot/tab/pad/board delineation, and the fraction/inch/foot/yard scale that accompanies it. A nice way of framing these issues.
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"Someday I hope game designers really are seen as trusted personal trainers, and that we have the chance to take people through proven processes that pay off in the long run. More gamesight, a surprising social safety net and support system, a more engaging environment, a higher quality of life." You trust a good designer to deliver good experience, regardless of the pain they put you through.
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"Unknown games are always the best ones… They are always stronger, funnier, cleverer and better-executed than their realities and so that walk home from the store, when the game is tangible in your hands but still imagined in your mind, is oftentimes the most potent moment in the videogame experience." A lovely piece from Simon on what the end of a certain kind of retail experience will really mean.
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"Steve Rose notes that the recent films have seen Bond visit and destroy as much villain-architecture as ever ("The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He's basically an enemy of architecture"), and suggests this can be traced back to Fleming's difficulties with Modernist architects." Rod on Bond is always good, and bonus points for the punning title.
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"A series looking at different aspects of guardian.co.uk's rebuild and redesign project, which ran from October 2005 to September 2008." Looks like there's going to be some good stuff emerging from this; great to see the Guardian making it so public.
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Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over
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"I must admit that I would have loved to get this richness of backstory into the actual game itself, but the longer pipeline of game asset development and integration made that impossible." Clint Hocking explaining the background behind the fictional blog for Far Cry 2.
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The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.
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"A few weeks ago we released our shapefiles via the API, and while most people were excited, some folks were a bit confused about what it all meant. Which is why Tom Taylor’s beautiful Boundaries application is so exciting. It helps you visualize the Flickr community’s twisty changing complex understanding of place." Tom is on code.flickr.com! Hurrah!
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"Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment." A brief history of pixelfonts.
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"Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild." This is exactly the kind of thing I was banging on about at Gamecity. Presentation online soon!
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"We're still going through the stats, but at the time of writing there were almost 170,000 messages on the Strictly [Come Dancing] board." Holy hell. Poor moderators. (And: for such an uninteresting story, as well!)
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"If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse." Iroquois on co-op, and the way Left 4 Dead sees online co-op – and the bad behaviour of players online – as design problems to solve, rather than to ignore.
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"Who designs a character for gamers to never go near? Who spends the time to create the most terrifying creature imaginable, and doesn’t impose it on players? Well, clearly Valve. The temptation to have her be aggravated from great distances, to force her to attack when encountered, must have been there. But then she’d have lost her power. Her power comes from just sitting there. It’s that benign, ragged, vulnerable form. It’s the combination of singing and crying. Oh God, the singing *and* crying." John Walker examines the horror of Left 4 Dead's Witch. A little over-written perhaps, but he totally nails the fear the character instills, and the way you always notice her a split-second too late.
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Mitch just isn't inspired by user-generated content, no matter how charming a core game might be. The comments thread on this one is really good.
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"The next generation on from them – e.g. Jonathan Smith, Doug Church and of course Greg Costikyan (from whose classic essay on developing such a critical language the title of this post is lifted) are always eloquent, passionate and insightful speakers and spokespeople for their medium. Unlike Molyneux." Not too annoyed I missed this, given Matt's comments.
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"…the players are there for their character, not for your story. Your story is just the path for their characters, the medium through which they can play their persona. Once the GM realizes this, they should then realize that respecting the player and the character is paramount to their story. And it’s a surprisingly easy skill to master, because it really is as simple as recognizing what the players and characters want, what they came to do and then give it to them."
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"Demeter quit his bank job two months ago and has launched a company, Demiforce, to develop more electronic games. Now he has a salaried staff, five games in development and two coming out by Christmas, including a spinoff to "Trism" called "Trismology."" I hope his success continues; scaling up always seems scary, but Trism was – and is – superb.
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"The conundrum is that no path, no vision of progress – technological, social, moral – will be plausible today if it does not include the complexity of costs, yet it will not be desirable if it does. That makes our society blind." Some good, if dense, Kevin Kelly.
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"I wrote a script that lets you see what this money could buy if we weren’t throwing it at second-rate comedians or third-rate bankers. What if we spent it on schools, or teachers, or wispas instead? My script lets you see that by altering the text of Guardian articles as you browse." Ben's hack was brilliant in its simplicity, and really does change the way you read the news.
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"Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods." Location-based game that forces you to travel out of your normal areas, and potentially explore transport networks. Also: not designed around specific devices, just laptop+wifi.
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"Fallout 3 is a tribute to intent. It's not a rallying cry for any cause or even a cautionary tale about the hypothetical horrors of nuclear holocaust. It's a statement on the worthlessness of inaction. It's about not staying in the vault."
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"Far Cry 2 doesn’t so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player as it does to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, letting the player loose in that world." One of my favourite pieces of writing on FC2, if only because it captures the nature of the game so well.
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"Oddly, although Left 4 Dead only comes out today, Gamestop.com has already switched from their previews to reviews. You'd think that wouldn't be enough time for their users to appraise the game. You would even think that they'd want to play the full game before trumpeting their thoughts and throwing around phrases like "game of the year." You would be wrong." Mitch is harsh but fair.
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"See what's been discovered by the Wasteland inhabitants!" Collaborative slippymap of what people are finding in the DC Wasteland in Fallout 3.
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"Images don't automatically attach to emails. I hope you and your husband can work things out though." Oh dear.
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"For all the prioritizing and severitizing (which costs a lot of time during bug input) the best method of bug sorting was human communication." Yes. Too much time has been lost in too many custom installs of JIRA.
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"Hi everybody, I'm Brandon, and this is Offworld." Oh! This could be good.
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"The touch screen method of controlling the ship brings this fact out into startling clarity and suddenly your perspective shifts like you've been staring at a poster of messy green and red ducks in a row and suddenly you can see the fricking sailboat for the love of god, YES! FINALLY!" Simon explains why rRootage on the iPhone makes sense. (It does: your finger both controls the ship and obscures it, so your finger _becomes_ the ship, and now you're just guiding your finger through the bullets).
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Five different apps that share data between your Mac and your iPhone in a variety of potentially useful ways.
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Jolly good interview with Stephen Cakebread and Craig Howard from Bizarre Creations about the evolution of the Geometry Wars series. In a nutshell: simple games, simply made, and then honed to perfection, or as near as you can get. It's the honing that's important
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"Somewhere, across whatever barriers stand between, is an other." Jason Rohrer's new game is for two.
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"A 200-year-old church building has disappeared from a village in central Russia, officials from the Russian Orthodox Church say… It was intact in July but some time in early October thieves made off with it brick by brick." Um.
Surplus
12 November 2008
From this Eurogamer news article:
Microsoft has boasted selling over 2 million copies of Gears of War 2 during its opening weekend.
Furthermore, more than 1.5 million Xbox Live account holders played the game, according to Major Nelson – clocking up a record 15 million gameplay hours between them.
15 million hours is a lot of CPU time on the triple-core Xenon that runs a 360; a lot of processor power.
There might not be a cognitive surplus, but here’s a thought: what happens if, as a kind of “CPU-tax”, you require manufacturers to include an “extra” CPU or core in certain kinds of products – entertainment products, set-top boxes, consoles, PVRs, that kind of thing. That CPU is self-contained – processor memory, the lot – and devoted to running something like Folding@Home in the background, or whatever the next massive philanthropic grid-computing project the world needs to run is. Maybe you specify specific charity interests you have, so you can contribute to projects you care more about.
And then you have 15 million hours of 3 cores running Gears of War 2, and 15 million hours of protein-folding. Seems like a good trade-off to me.
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Weird; point-and-click adventures, but where each command requires the artist draw a new image. A lot of it seems pre-determined, but there's obviously slow evolution at work. The game is _released_ frame by frame, though, which is interesting.
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"So that’s what I would like: software you can live with. Software that feels like music." Contextual software.
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It's not Tetris, but it's something like it. This game is getting worryingly essential.
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"PROBLEM: There is no way I can justify to myself spending that much money on plastic cows. Really, there is no way. WIN-WIN: I could however justify giving that same amount of money, or more, to a worthwhile charity. That would be an easy thing." Matt wants cows, in return for giving money to charity.
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Oh wow; it's like a developer network for LittleBigPlanet. Smashing.
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"On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…" Lovely.
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'"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of, over time, becoming $100 million-plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us," Kotick said.' Kotick is very serious about his use of the word 'exploit'.
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""The ability to offer these songs on a subscription basis may very well result in the newest subscription opportunity in our portfolio," he said." Kotick wants you to pay Activision to subscribe to UGC. Oh dear.
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Beautiful.
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"As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop– not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others– will be huge." Lots of good reflections from "Tinkering As A Mode Of Knowledge".
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Visualising the heights of people's towers by importing their savegame. Lovely.
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"By understanding the way bees respond to all the different aspects of the natural world, the beekeeper is able to recover his own relationship to the natural world through bees."
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"Every time Bobby Kotick opens his mouth, I see a giant cow with "GUITAR HERO" branded on its side, and Bobby Kotick is squeezing two teats as fast as he can."