"So here are some social media and music articles you could go away and write yourselves: I’ve even included example sentences to get you started." Social media is like All The Things.

"If there is a bigger Splinter Cell fan than myself, I haven't yet met them; but in their zeal to promote the newest iteration, Ubisoft has caused Sam Fisher to tweet. And I don't mean they've made him chirp, which would be preferable. They've given him a Twitter account where he tweets in a supremely earnest way about how tormented his shit is.<br />
<br />
*No.*" Oh dear.

"A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving." Oh boy. That's quite a thing (and: quite a sentence!)

"I've been using Copy with Style command, which I took from this blog post. It copies text selection as RTF so when the code is pasted into Keynote, it looks exactly the same as it looked in TextMate, including font style, size and colors. Code can be then modified in Keynote, while the style is preserved." Useful!

"Here are nine individuals who know more than you do about some elements of online communities – even if they couldn’t necessarily put it in writing." How did I miss this the first time around?

"Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all – it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.

'“The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”' Masses of good things in here – think I've quoted it elsewhere – but it's not on my Delicious, so in it goes.

"DFC's main takeaway from the study is that the flexible, quickly-adaptable nature of online distribution services like Steam allow for developers to use a broad variety of promotions and incentives to keep their game communities fresh; individual promotions like the Survival Pack had a positive effect on both platforms, but it was the one-two punch of that DLC plus the followup free weekend through Steam that had the most meaningful impact on the game at any point on either platform."

Art of the Title interview the chaps behind Wall-E's end credits, which knocked me out the first time I saw them, and still give me the loveliest buzz to this day.

Generates a tiny file to do the most basic things, from the looks of it.

"Jones said how most open city games tend to come with about 100 licensed tracks, but that they realised that most players would far rather listen to their own mp3 collection. But this is an online game. So they’ve done a deal with Last.FM to use their technology in such a brilliantly imaginative way. If you’re listening to a favourite track in your car, and drive past some other players, should they have the same track on their hard drive the game will find it, and they’ll hear it from your car as you go by. Should they not have it, the game will find a track that’s similar and play that instead." Just that quotation alone is remarkable, but it really does sound like APB is something special; let's just hope it's a success.

"…there are an awful lot of excellent reasons for ending a blog, and that many blogs which do end are by no means “failures”. Social media coverage in general should focus a lot less on the things people do or don’t “achieve” via these tools, and more on the fact that conversation, writing, collaboration and suchlike are pleasants thing to do in and of itself. Reclaim social media for the flaneurs, is I guess what I’m saying!" Tom Ewing is right.

"But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners." Lots of great stuff in this Stross Keynote.

Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful.

"Shepard gets in his warm space suit and Mako vehicle and takes on the blizzard. I go outside and walk to work in the rain. That comparatively insignificant section of the game stands out more clearly than any other, which doesn't mean anything to anyone else other than me. I never loved Mass Effect, but I may remember that for the rest of my life." Duncan Fyfe on memories. He speaks truth.

Jason Rohrer has a new puzzle game out, designed primarily for iPhone but also available for OSX/Windows/Linux as ever. The UI is very thoughtful, for something finger-driven; the game mechanic is complex, but I think I'll get a handl eon it soon. I hope.

"As I watched the gunfire on screen, I should have been wondering what it was like to actually be in the shoes of those soldiers. But as I sat staring, I instead wondered whether the Marines had bothered to observe that building for civilian inhabitants before demolishing it. I wondered how any Marine that got shot in Iraq could endorse a game based on Fallujah where you can be hit by a hail of bullets and walk away. By the end, I was left wondering what Konami was thinking." A strong article from Nick Breckon on the problems already showing with Six Days In Fallujah. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, and not at all knee-jerk. I, too, am already concerned.

Lovely: Creature Comforts meets "Hey There Little Fella". Totally charming.

Ocean Quigley has a blog, and whilst all the stuff on Spore and Sim City 4 is super-nice, what I really like are his paintings and sketches, which are just lovely.

"Daily deep-dive analysis of a specimen from the modern world's most exciting communication medium for penis humor."

More on the phenomenon that is Ken Fighter Ken.

This is a pretty accurate explanation of the state of the majority of SF4 online. It's also quite funny, and is the reason the phrase "Flowchart Ken", used to described a particular kind of player, is already entering the SF4 Lexicon.

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again." Ryanair's social media strategy is pretty much on-brand, it seems.

'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.

A first, rather long, post on the S&W Blog, in which I talk to Jack about a project he's been working on for a while.

"This summer will you be, or not be? It's Resident Evil meets House of the Dead, IN DENMARK." Epic Eegra thread taking the Dante's Inferno-shaped ball and running a very, very long way with it.

Full version, no out! The beta was lovely, so I'm looking forward to this a lot.

"[Wrestle Jam is] completely playable. There was an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks," Furino explained. "It was as close to a genuine old-school wrestling game as I could make it in the time allowed. I even mapped an old Nintendo controller to the input system so they could play it that way." Gosh, that's lovely, if not totally unexpected from Arronofsky. Lovely interview, too.

"Designing a game for a limited platform is not only a great exercise for a development team, but can often give real insights into how to take an existing product into a whole new area — often with great improvements to controls and the whole user interface and experience." Denki on porting from low-spec digital TV boxes to even-lower spec digital TV boxes. Some good stuff in here, particularly around constraint.

"…once WoLK came out and half the guild went completely insane and started chasing the really silly achievements, it was clear we were going to need an RSS feed of the things. So I built one. It’s based on the Armory, like most WoW tools, and is a complete kludge, like most of my tools. But here are my notes anyway." Hurrah! Tom wrote his magic tool up. It's great, it's daft, and I love the Armory's crazy XML. Alas, my achievements are few and far between…

"it seems to me Criterion, in particular, has identified and implemented a strategy that works remarkably well in the current games marketplace: release the best product you can and stand behind it; improve the quality and player experience with frequent upgrades; offer additional value-added content worth charging for; nurture the relationship between your consumers and your development team; and give folks what they want."

"Translator 'tempestas_caput' doesn't seem to offer any explanation as to why he's translated Zelda II into Latin, so we just won't ask. But it's not the only game getting his "sleeping language" treatment: he's also he's also gone alone, dangerously with the original Zelda, and is making his way, even more ambitiously, through Final Fantasy III." Brilliant!

"…if the future of games is to become entertainment services, then are subscriptions going to fall away in favour of upfront payments and free updates?" Some good thinking from Duncan.

"Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage."

"So, you finally caved. You've accepted a friend request from your Mom, Dad, crazy Aunt Ida, and your college roommate’s newly divorced mother. Well here's your chance to get back at them for taking away your public privacy."

Daft, lovely, and hypnotic to watch.