-
Russell on Joe Moran's new book, which I'm clearly going to have to read.
-
Matt Haughey on ten years of MetaFilter.
-
"Dyack’s controversial message was delivered during a talk at Brighton, UK's Develop Conference calling for games to be considered as "the Eighth Art." He highlighted the writings of Ricciotto Canudo, an Italian author and one of the first theorists of film who considered cinema to be the Seventh Art." More to come on this – because I was there and disagreed a lot. That said, Dyack was interesting – I just don't think he's correct. This is mainly because he's adapting the writings of someone writing film theory for people new to film, as opposed to the film theory that happens when the audience understand it.
-
"Apple thinks this is good enough. And that’s the scariest part of all." Marco explains why.
Conference time: Develop 2009
06 July 2009
Next week is Develop in Brighton, the UK’s premiere games industry conference, and I’m going to be involved in two sessions there.
The first session is part of “Evolve“, a single day before the conference proper combining their old online and mobile tracks into something more focused on the edges of the games industry – so now including social and casual gaming as well.
With a panel of industry experts, I’ll be asking the question “What Do Social Networking Sites Have To Offer The Games Industry“:
Facebook and Myspace each have over 100m unique users. The users of these sites are not only coordinating their leisure time through them, but spending their leisure time on them, and even playing games on them. What does that mean for the games industry? How can traditional games and game companies engage with the social networks – their users, their platforms, and the core gamers already using them? Are Facebookers casual-gamers-in-waiting? This panel invites representatives from top social networks to explain what gaming means for their products, and how they can support your efforts as games developers.
Hopefully, given the panel’s strengths and expertise, we can come up with some wide-ranging – and interesting – answers.
In addition to that, as part of the conference proper, I’m going to be talking about Games As A Service: what service design is, what it means for games and products of the future, and how some of the territory Schulze & Webb has been exploring when it comes to unproduct might apply to games. It’s called Never Mind The Box: Games As A Service:
The effort and finances needed to build full retail games is growing unsustainable. But what if you weren’t making a product? What would Games As A Service look like? Services encourage loyalty; they turn products into platforms; they empower users; they play well with others and connect to existing services; and at the large scale, they wrap other products and become super-products. Using examples from inside and outside the games industry – from tiny, open-source Davids to console-licensed Goliaths – Tom Armitage examines already successful notions of service design and explores what it will mean for your games, big or small.
So that’s next week, then. Better start writing them. And if you’re going to be at Develop next week – do come say hello!
-
"At 14, Caroline Moore became the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. But months later, we're still figuring out how her find, dubbed SN 2008HA, can actually exist, since it defies everything we thought we knew." Awesome.
-
"Frankly anyone who thinks you need anything else for a working online content model is living in the past." Hah!
-
"Fast-forward ten years, and I'm now using all those accessibility features on a daily basis. At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative (browsing) devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone."
-
"LEDs pulse back and forth in the mantle to indicate roughly how many friends are on Xbox Live. It goes into red alert if anyone's playing Left 4 Dead." Nicely done; might poke something similar into life for myself, just for kicks.
-
Tim O'Reilly on what he learned from studying the classics at University. Simply because of competence at the languages, I know more of the Romans than the Greeks, but this is thoughtful stuff. I was often asked at school by peers why I'd study something of "no practical value"; O'Reilly has some smart answers.
-
"I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin… I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix. Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue." That gap in culture is something that still fascinates me.
-
"Fresh data straight out of our uber warehouse: As the news breaks, scrobbles soar as people go to pay tribute to one of the greatest pop artists of all times." I really didn't want to talk about this story at all – but at least there's some interesting data about it. So have some data.
-
"Pincus said game-based activity like this was an investment of what he called “social capital,” a means of maintaining contact with our growing network of friends and acquaintances. If the industry further emphasized this advantage in future games, Pincus argued with charming bullishness, social gaming could become as pervasive as social networks themselves."
-
'With Facebook Connect coming to Xbox 360 later this year, could we see similar connectivity between Xbox 360 and Facebook games? "Absolutely," Facebook's head of platform Ethan Beard told me back at E3. "Yeah, totally. That's a simple one — that's an easy one. There's probably things that we haven't even thought of [coming later]."' Hmmn. Worth a quotation, at least.
-
"…once we return to the sun, late on in our economic history, are we still innocent enough to view it this way? The sun isn't so very different from the Beatles back catalogue – there's a lot of it around, you can't control it, we value it highly, it's a 'public good problem' – but the Beatles are subject to various legal and political protections, most recently retrospective copyright extension. If EMI are allowed to profit from music that they didn't create, might not North Africa have some right to profit from energy that it didn't create?" Some brilliant stuff from Will Davies
-
"Prayer is an appropriate analogy: So many prayers are poems, and most are repeated to the point at which they become pure sound, a soothing sequence of syllables which remind us of something. “Hallowed be thy name” is not a phrase, for example, which immediately gives up its meaning in everyday English, and yet it still comforts those who intone it. The shipping forecast shows a bit, I think, how both poems and prayers work." A top trump of the web today: S3FM, RIG, the shipping forecast and numbers stations all in one post. Blimey.
-
"If the promise of previous generations was “games that just work”, and the current that “games work with each other”, then the promise of the NEXT generation will be this: That true next-gen game platforms will comprise services that *just work* with one another." Yes. Interoperability can take many forms, and it's easier to make work at a service than a platform level.
-
"I imagine this is how everybody who responds to the idea of Twitter with “Who cares if you’re eating a sandwich?” envisions Twitter." Yes.
-
"Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model." This kind of proscription (or encouragement) of behaviour is interesting, and I think there are a variety of ways to do it "sensibly". And: how did you expand the group of "people who fit its prescribed social model"? Small changes of behaviour, amongst larger groups, are much, much more interesting.
-
"Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down." Sad, really.
-
It's the hip-hop-songs-as-charts meme, but about being a PC gamer. Moderate chuckles abound.
-
"…after spending this weekend fighting Resident Evil 5's grabasstical interface I am somewhat persuaded that there's a real divide when it comes to eastern and western design sensibilities, and this divide has everything to do with the design-centric and productivity-centric tendencies of North American tech culture." Which is an interesting way of looking at it; I'm going to hold my thoughts until Iroquois has written more on this. Manveer Heir (of Raven Software) leaves an interesting comment on the post.
-
"Playdar is a music content resolver service – run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and friends' music collections." Feels a lot like Audioscrobbler did when that first launched; it'll be interesting to see what user-friendly services get wrapped around it.
-
"The PushButton Engine is an open-source game engine and framework that's designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences." Flash and Box2D from the looks of things. This could be really, really interesting.
-
"…these ideas have been massively influenced by friends working in game design, agile website design or service design. Narrative media is still (outside of gaming) light-years behind the curve compared to the work going on in these disciplines, so a lot of the time I’m trying to act as a translator – taking concepts and ideas from more functional design disciplines into narrative/editorial contexts. When I speak to indies or producers, there’s a set of blogs/presentations that I tend to refer them to, so I thought i’d start by sharing this reading list." This looks like it's going to be an excellent series from Matt Locke.
-
Takahashi being wonderfully perceptive and making some interesting observations. Also, describing some lovely design decisions in the beautiful, soothing, and bonkers Noby Noby Boy. I still need a soundtrack CD for that game.
-
"Sheeeeeeeeeeeeit! BBC, you just don’t deserve to get your hands on these shows." Yes – whilst we all binged on the Wire when we had it on DVD, that doesn't mean that the "binge" is the correct method of consumption. 60 episodes across 12 weeks? Madness, and I say that as a Wire fan.
-
"Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).
-
"…I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.
-
Jolly good, this, with lots of sensible points and a real clarity of thought for what otherwise could just be Powerpoint-by-numbers.
-
Cordell Barker's 1988 cartoon. I didn't even think this might be on Youtube.
-
After yesterday's stop-motion, this is perhaps even more remarkable and strange. Seriously, it's jaw-droppingly clever; daren't think how long it took.
-
"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need." Late to link to this, but as everyone else who has done already would point out: it's great.
-
"The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ – usually after severe alcohol abuse – and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere. Quite a while ago now, we sat down and thought, well, this is ridiculous – we can’t keep this notion that game development is a purely creative process, and that you have to build it to be able to see it. There’s got to be another way." Peter Molyneux becomes a bit more self-aware, possibly a little too late.
-
How did I miss this when Lee first wrote it? This is all-encompassing, wonderful stuff about visualisation, exercise, comics, futurism, privacy, and the whole shebang. Top notch stuff, worth a read.
-
"Clatter is a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on to a soft contact lens. Clatter differs from other, commercial lens services by being open source and "riding" other services to create free cross-platform access." From Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless.
-
"The question of responsibility and accountability gets sticky here – especially if we consider that technologies are too often viewed as neutral tools or isolated artefacts. If we draw out these flows, these networks, these interconnections, we find ourselves faced with the possibility of being connected to people/objects/places/activites/ideas that we may never see. And with intimacy always comes risk."
-
"Commissioned by the advertising agency Nordpol+ Hamburg I designed the origami models and consulted the stopmotion as well as the computer animators of this world wide corporate movie that tells the story of the japanese sports brand ASICS. The movie won a Grand Prix at the Eurobest, gold at the New York festival, gold at the London International Awarts, silver at the Clio in Miami and two times bronze at ADC Germany." And it deserves all those awards; a beautiful piece of animation and paper-folding.