"Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.

"Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.

"'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' … It's because computers are fire… If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process–documentation, as it were–but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."

This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.

The Offworld 20 "…isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.

"Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it… turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.

"…my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological– lighting effects, texture work, mocapping– but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."

"…it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."

"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.

Because I've never known how to spell it until now, and it's one of my favourite words.

Very beautiful, and, so far, very sensible implementation of touch interactions. Looking forward to playing much more of this over the holidays.

"Tears shouldn’t be our goal. Stories don’t need to be our tools. The majority of art forms don’t rely on narrative for their emotional impact. Stop and think about that for a second. The games industry tends to draw on such an amazingly limited roster of inspirations that it’s easy to forget it. But our obsession with linear, story-based – word-based, even – non-participatory art at the expense of all the other forms makes life so much harder for games, and it makes me crazy."

"Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental "awesoments" that compose all good things. The Periodic table of Awesoments can be a very useful tool. It's designed to show the relationships between awesoments, and often one can even predict how awesoments interact simply by their positions on the table."

Very good – some good stuff around how the library works, but also lots of basics around how to optimise Javascript.

Gerard Way reviews Left 4 Dead on My Chemical Romance's (totally excellent) blog.

"Left 4 Dead is out
Friends kill zombies together
Is it worth getting?"
Yes Gerard, it is.

"If you want a recipe for restless sleep, I can give you one. Add one part “what will my wife think” with 3,000 parts Benjamin Franklin; stir in a “beer anytime you damn well please” and top with a chance at financial independence."

"Rails Metal is a thin wrapper around Rails’ new Rack middleware support." Which means you can process requests outside of ActionPack, which is useful for the odd performance boost in certain places. Interesting to see concerns separating out within Rails like this.

"A dude by the name of Phoebus has posted a collection of his research on Left 4 Dead's infected and weapon damage statistics over on the official Steam forums. I think that it'll be of great interest for any serious player of the game to delve into this information." There's a question over their accuracy, but there's still a decent amount of detail here, and the details on tail-off of weapon damage is useful to know. Also a relief to have the hellacious friendly-fire damage on Expert confirmed.

Fascinating to watch some of the body shapes – the hunched run, and in particular the the saut du chat – carry through to modern Parkour; that which is practical has always been so. As with all parkour: parts of it are beautiful, parts of it entertaining, and parts of it superhuman.

"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of." More on this topic from Jones; still think there's something we're not quite hitting yet, but it's all good stuff.

Stack lets you subscribe to a selection of independent magazines; you choose how many you want a year, and they send you a selection. A really nice idea, although it'll be interesting to see them broaden their horizons a bit.

"Program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious." Chef is a programming language where the programs are also valid (if strange) recipes. The syntax description is proper crazy; gives Homespring a run for its money, easily, in the realm of metaphorical programming languages that embrace their metaphor.

"This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person."

"…most public objects – and certainly all municipal objects – should offer APIs. Furthermore, specifically with regard to public infrastructures like transit systems, I believe that this should be a matter of explicit government policy. What’s a public object? A sidewalk. A building facade. A parking meter. Any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public. Any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way. Any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessible to the public, regardless of its ownership or original intention. How’s that for starters?"

Better than GetBundle, apparently – hunts down unofficial bundles on github and the like, as well. Nifty.

"What a wonderful idea," Jennifer noted. "We never get to see the people who make the games." Michael Abbott is talking about LittleBigPlanet.

Leanoard rounds up his favourite DS homebrew games. Some good stuff in here that I didn't know of.

"This is just one of many examples that show you can participate in online community without having to pretend to be something you’re not. In fact, participating with authenticity is not just morally good, it’s measurably more effective."

Powazek is right; this is definitely smart advertising, and full props to EA/W+K for just taking the credit and not trying to make it "viral"; it'll do that anyway. Although: it really is a glitch, you know.

"AlterEgo is a Ruby implementation of the State pattern as described by the Gang of Four. It differs from other Ruby state machine libraries in that it focuses on providing polymorphic behavior based on object state. In effect, it makes it easy to give an object different “personalities” depending on the state it is in." Oh, that could be really handy.

Oh gosh this is brilliant.

"Simply stick your finger in the hole and a virtual representation appears on the screen. Then you can use your virtual finger to play all kinds of cool mini games… from swinging a panda to having a karate fight with a tiny little man." Um, wow. Although I'm always afraid of putting appendages in boxes I can't see inside, though.

I think they're wrong, you know. It's not theatre; it's protocol. Maybe people aren't used to the protocol; if yours is the first app they encounter, they'll think that it's OK to show what passwords are – and perhaps that it's OK to write them down elsewhere in plaintext. Applications have a degree of responsibility for users' interactions across the internet, and quirky and cute as this may be, it's just not the place to demonstrate your shining personality.

The Brian Dettmer is beautiful. Also: didn't realise the heart/cube cogs were paper, not wood.

"…it's another little example of the way the ipod/iphone is such an attention-demanding device. It doesn't orient to you, it orients to itself." Yes. This is a problem.

"The US auto industry is on the verge of imploding. People are losing their homes to foreclosure. And, on the off chance that you had the nerve to try to buy something, credit is almost impossible to come by. It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about working for free. Why? Because I think it is one of the fastest ways to make yourself a better photographer, whether you are a pro or an amateur."

"To the extent that the web is becoming truly ubiquitous, and involves increasingly multimodal paradigms of interaction, it seems appropriate to define a Web standard for representing emotion-related states, which can provide the required functionality." No, it does not seem appropriate. It seems bonkers.

Hey, I've been in that relationship too! These made me laugh a lot.

"bill. francis. louis – look here. help." Ah, the fun of the farm. It's all coming back to me now.

Oh my. And I thought Astley didn't really like all the publicity from this. Clearly he's had a change of heart.

"The Fuzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into designing and creating their own video games and demos. A full-featured core runs in the background and does all the video and audio processing so that your code stays clean and easy to understand." Ooh, that could be interesting.

"…the brief, in a nutshell, was to take a series of actual whisky barrels and find a way to express the vast lengths of time it takes to actually produce a bottle of Glenfiddich Single Malt." I found the results rather lovely.

"To state that another way, given a function f and input x, determine if f(x) will halt." AlanT puts out a tender on GetACoder for Turing's Halting Problem. The responses are entertaining.

"Sweet! Quick time events? Combos? Finishing moves? It’s like they distilled Watchmen to it’s very essence. Wonderful."

All of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. Made interactive. On Youtube. Horrible, barely "erotic", choose-your-own-adventure guff for the 3DO and PC. Don't click through.

"Just like the inspirations it cites, carry helps explore why we fight, and what happens to the people we send to war, all through the rules. The mechanics of the game work as well as the prose of The Things They Carried or the script of Full Metal Jacket in exploring life in the line of fire…" Sounds really interesting – games' unique ability is to convey meaning through systems, rather than prose, and it looks like carry really embraces that.

"Take a break from your computer! Download, print and build your own pinhole camera. Follow the instructions and enjoy!" Beautiful.

I love Jeff Bridges as a photographer, and his pictures from the Iron Man set are no exception.

"Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize."

"In a detailed technical feature with sample code, Team Bondi programmer Claus Höfele delves into the practical steps for your users to get gameplay footage automagically uploaded online." Good that this stuff is being published. This kind of stuff really isn't that difficult; the hard bit is recording footage from your game or framebuffer; the rest of the process is trivial, and hopefully coverage on sites like Gamasutra will help publicise this kind of interaction.

"The point in pointing out these numbers, since we’re throwing out analogies to films and videogame innovation, is that it seems that no matter how well a movie is interpreted as “innovative” by a reviewer, the truest mark of success lies in its ability to inure itself with the consumer." No. Commercial success is just one kind of success, and films like Eraserhead have had a far greater impact on young filmmakers than any amount of box-office smashes. The real rarities are films such as the Godfather or Citizen Kane, which manage to be box-office smashes and innovative masterpiece.

"Anytime I hear the alpha futurist-y featurists get all excited about some kind of idea for how the new ubicomp networked world will be so much more simpler and seamless and bug-free, I want to punch someone in the eye. They sound like a 5 year old who whines that they want a pink pony for their birthday." Julian has ubicomp fail.

Satoru Iwata interviews the product designer and producer behind the Wii Fit balance board. There's some interesting stuff on the prototyping process on the second and third page of the interview.