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Requires a chunk of configuration, but this is not half bad: allows you to use PHPUnit from the command line to actually, properly test CI models. Even lets you use YAML configuration files. Not bad.
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There are not expletives strong enough. In a nutshell: it's a pyramid scheme for following people you don't know on Twitter. It asks for your username and password. Terrifying.
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"Warning – this is a collection of half-formed thoughts, perhaps even more than usual." They seem pretty well-formed to me, even if the blogpost is a dense infoburst. Lots of solid gold in here, worth reading twice, slowly, and thinking on. And then working out what the conclusions are.
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"…you go to any page on Wikipedia; a "start" button appears on the page. You click it, and it sends you to a random Wikipedia page, and then displays your "target" page in a box at the bottom of the browser window (as shown in the illo above). Your goal is to navigate from the start page to the target page, using only links in the main body of each article; the game is timed, so presumably you're attempting to do it in the minimum amount of time." A Greasemonkey/js entrant to the Global Game Jam – unusual, to say the least, and an interesting move.
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And Kanye's datamoshing too. This is a bit more subtle and polished than the Chairlift video, but ideally suits the song.
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"Solid Snake, the special operations agent who frequently amuses himself by hiding in cardboard boxes, has been taped up and shipped to a warehouse in Oslo, Norway. Details are scarce at this point, but it appears Mr. Snake, famous for single-handedly dismantling Outer Heaven and destroying countless Metal Gears, made an error while shipping classified documents overseas and was picked up by a Fedex truck. The rescue operation has proved fruitless as of the time of this writing."
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"LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua." And it all looks rather pretty, too. Must investigate further!
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danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.
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"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.
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"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.
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"This is not intended to be a fun game. It has all the trappings of a LEGO game. It has the forgiving game mechanics. The ease of control. But it uses these elements to create a cognitive dissonance between the ease of the actions and the terrible nature of their real world counterparts." Corvus hypothesises what A Lego Clockwork Orange might look like. Thoughtful stuff.
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"So why not embrace it? That's why You Have To Burn The Rope is fantastic… for games to become art there must be an awareness and a conversation with its own history. Film, music, and literary critic call this allusion, but for the creators, this isn't just a word, it's a dialogue. Which means it should invite participants. For me, I'm far more intrigued by stop-motion artist Patrick Boivin's attempt at turning a linked sequence of videos into Youtube Street Fighter." I'm not sure I agree with Wang on YHTBTR, specifically, but this paragraph is reasonably sensible.
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65 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad, this LJ post shows photographs from the late 1940s merged with images of the location in the present. All are striking; some are very sad. Great contextualisation, though.
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"It's just 4 names, on a t-shirt. Buy it now because you know whats coming and by then, it'll be too late. Good luck." Want, so bad. And the kerning's not a million miles out.
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"MagiCal is a FREE menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock." Quite pretty, and makes a nice companion for FuzzyClock.
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"The microprinter is an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web. I use it for things like reminders, notifications, and my day at-a-glance, but anything that can be injected from the web and suits text only, short format messaging, will work." Tom writes up his printer in more detail.
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"We’ve recently switched a number of projects to ThinkingSphinx here at Hashrocket. These projects were originally using SOLR or UltraSphinx. Today, we’ll explore the differences between UltraSphinx and ThinkingSphinx and why we chose to switch." Detailed explanation of the advantages of ThinkingSphinx over UltraSphinx or other alternatives.
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"Last night I laser-etched the top of my Eee PC with the complete level maps of Super Mario Land ( on the Game Boy)." Just beautiful. (Thanks, Offworld!)
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"Compared to a standard web (un)conference where everyone knows their space, expertise and opinions, here lots (most?) of us were exploring stuff outside of our day job and business-as-usual. It was passionate and interesting and I felt completely out of my depth, which was was great. So in 2009, less of the comfort zone stuff please, and more like this." I can get behind that.
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"Morph was sometimes supposed to copy Hart's own artistic work, but not perfectly. In this way nervous children were reassured that even their endearing hero Morph could get it wrong, which made them determined to pick up their pens and pencils and other objects and do better… He believed that most of the things he did could be done only [on television]: "I hope that by example, and by humour, children will start to make pictures for themselves. Show them, don't tell them!"" I was terrible at art, and most forms of drawing, but I could watch his hands work all day.
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The New Frontiersman is on Flickr. The paperverse is collapsing. (Although: "taken on August 10, 2008" breaks the illusion a little).
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Leslie roughly captures a few thoughts I've had and some reasonably opinions. In a nutshell: the social value of tagging is broad, fuzzy, and a second-order effect. As a loose, freeform taxonomy for personal use, they're superb, and delicious captures that excellently. I tag for me; if it's useful for you, that's a nice side effect.
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"That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy."
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"Either way, I love reading these cables. The language is crafted so perfectly, despite the constraints. They’re caught between poetry and machinery." Yes. And what a different game it was then; lots to like in this taut post from Dan Hill.
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"Welcome to House of Bendie – a UK clothing line that takes classic, British suiting fabrics and creates unsuit-like clothes for men and women. We specialise in bespoke hoodies: hand-made, made-to-measure, hooded jackets crafted from exquisite suit materials." Oh, lovely.
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"Generated" certainly is the wrong word.
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"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.
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"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.
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"'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."
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"…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."
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"…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."
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"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.
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Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.
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Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.
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Jaw well and truly on the floor.
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"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
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"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
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Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine – the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.
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Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?
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"Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!
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"So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.
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"The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.
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This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.
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"And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.
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"The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."
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"Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."
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Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).
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"Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.
Obama for America, the MMO
07 October 2008
Almost everybody’s linked to the Obama ’08 Official iPhone Application by now. With just cause, as well; it’s a nifty, attractive piece of crowdsourced software development that focuses on a single task that’s well suited to mobile – canvassing – and provides the amateur campaigner with the tools to canvas more effectively.
Skimming over the official page, though, I couldn’t help but notice this in the list of features:
See nationwide Obama ’08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
So whilst you’re canvassing your friends and recording just how many of them are going to vote for Barack in November, you can also compare yourself to how everybody else using the app is doing. In one click, you’ve got a massively multiplayer high score chart – and of course, you’re going to want to beat everybody else on there, so you go off to canvas some more.
Obama for America just launched an MMO, and nobody noticed.
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"You know the [dark days] when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web war born, back before that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked."
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"…doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly."
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Ooh – a decent search tool for cc'd Flickr images.
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"This would be something different though potentially – not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art."
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"Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing." A nice SFGate piece that at least acknowledges the complexities of community management.
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"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it… you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?
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Wonderful.
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"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people… Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."
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"Recently I had been wondering what the complete list of HTTP status code symbols was in Rails. Searching through Rails didn't yield any results for a symbol like :unprocessable_entity… Rails defines the symbol to status code mapping dynamically from the status message. The symbol used is an underscored version of the status message with no spaces." Quick list of clear textual shorthand for returning HTTP status.
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"Let’s no longer think in terms of selling them a game. Let’s instead think of selling them an experience." A nice article on the changing shape of game design, particularly when it comes to narrative and participatory hooks.