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."

"A modern tale about caring, mending and letting-go, drawn with letters and punctuation marks." Oh! This is just beautiful – a short story about a girl, and a snail, composed entirely out of type.

"Not what I had in mind at all." George Oates on how her firing from Flickr played out, which was pretty horrific as it turned out – she was on the other side of the world, presenting on behalf of the firm. I am really not sure what Yahoo! hope to gain from many of their recent redundancies, and least of all this one.

"You want to hear some gluttons eternally force-fed cake and chocolate milk? I don’t know what else XBox Live microtransactions were made for, broseph. " Hardcasual, I love you.

Eric Kaltman is blogging the Cabrinety Collection, and he's doing a great job so far.

"The Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing at Stanford University consists of several thousands of pieces of computer hardware and software. Dating primarily from the 1980s and 1990s, the collection chronicles the formative era of personal computing, specifically computer gaming." Amazing.

"Psychologists know that torture causes, among other horrid things, lasting mental-health problems. But 24's frantically violent fairy tales are typical of what passes for mass-cultural debate about torture. We're not encouraged to think about what happens next, so we don't. It is a massive failure of the public imagination. Which is why we need more torture in videogames." Clive Thompson responds to Richard Bartle's issues with that WoW quest, and he makes some sensible points, although I still have some issues with the Blizzard implementation.

Lovely – and, amazingly, free – shmup for the iPhone. Move the ship up/down with the direction of your finger; drag over enemies to lock; release to fire. Pretty, fast, and not crippled despite your finger being in the way.

"The problem I have with the note is not that he was having a party and didn't invite me, it was that he selected a vibrant background of balloons, effectively stating that his party was going to be vibrant and possibly have balloons and that I couldn't come." David Thorne knows how to wind people up.

Um. An "artwork/game/digital poem/world of scribbles" from Jason Nelson. Stop trying to "get it".

"My Favorite Book Covers of 2008" Some I'd seen before; some I'd not. Some very beautiful things here.

"I come from a software background, as well as an artsy-fartsy one. I want to see games as art, but they’re also supposed to work as logically-constructed bodies of code. And in a lot of cases, reviewers need to see them as software rather than as art. Here’s why…" I think Steve has some good points here, but I'm not totally swung yet; after all, games might _be_ software, but do we _experience_ them as software? I'm not sure that we do, and that's why we respond to them in the manner we do.

"The ultimate resource in grid systems."

Pretty much spot on. Especially when it comes to GRIMDARK PIRATE COMICS.

"Does the road to ludonarrative unity really lead us where we want to go? Is the destination reachable? Is it possible to embrace a design aesthetic that takes us in another direction that could be just as fruitful, if not more so? Okay that was three questions, but it's my blog so I get to ask as many as I want. Now if I could only answer them." This is going to be interesting when I come to write about Far Cry 2.

"a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day". Yes please!

Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over

"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.

The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.

"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!

"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.

"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!

"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!)

"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.

"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.

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.

"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.

"…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."

"Far Cry 2 is about you and death. Of course every single person you meet wants to kill you. Of course you spend about as much time fighting the environment as other persons. Of course you are clinging to the barest scrap of health and well-being; Even the malaria is trying to kill you."

"I spent 10 weeks last Summer as an intern on the strategy team of Transport for London's (TfL) London Rail division…. My general task was to help London Rail start to make use of the oceans of data spewing out of the Oyster smartcard ticketing system, but I spent the bulk of my time working on a project that came to be titled Oyster-Based Performance Metrics for the London Overground. I've posted my final report and slides and outline for the presentation I gave to TfL executive management." Some interesting data and information here.

BioWare now have a blog. It looks like it's going to be full of good stuff about games and, especially, writing for them. Can't wait.

"The international conference “Thinking After Dark: Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games” unites scholars who all study a corpus that has been left out up to now: horror video games. Considering the relatively slow progress of generic studies among the recent surge of academic interest towards video games, this event represents a major first step."

Science doctoral candidates attempt to communicate their thesis subjects through the medium of dance. The winners get time with a professional choreographer to make the whole thing better, and to see it performed by professional dancers at the end. Crazy, wonderful.

"On this definition, obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing." Some good writing from Steven Poole on games and chores.

"My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications." Some really good insight, presented in a very clear manner. DanC is, as usual, on fire. Need to digest this slowly, but it certainly overlaps with a lot of my thinking.

"…the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world — a fascinating prospect." This captures a lot of the great things about FC2 well, and in an even-handed manner. The lack of handholding is jarring, but the possibilities it opens up are wonderful. For a tense, hectic, genre, it's interesting to see an entry that's by turns soothing and surreal, amidst the malaria, bushfires, and wholesale slaughter.

Just like magic. Lovely.

Spot-on, as you'd expect.

"As the population of the system grows, everyone's personal horizons begin to shrink. With enough people, eventually you're talking to the people right in your neighborhood. To get a message to someone across the country, you might lie about your location, or ask that it be passed on, Milgram-style." Filtering by proximity in a restrictive – but potentially more useful – manner. Interesting.

"This is the challenge, it seems to me: it's to do with the tools of design– rules and states– what other media do with images and sound: reveal the world as seen through different eyes, with lapidary clarity and moral courage. And this means moving beyond merely empowering and entertaining the player."

"Everything breaks, so what happens when we wire the world on the sort of massive scale being proposed and every day is more irritating than the next? Probably what will happen is that people will just walk away from the entire project damning it first with market insignificance and if that doesn't work then rendering it meaningless with government regulation. It's worth at least talking about." Aaron is awesome.

"And if there was a "prize" in this lottery, it was not so much the object itself, but the letter and the awesome mysteries of unfathomable spiritual connections, and the very gesture itself from this dear, dear person and the timing!" What a story.

"These concepts are not complicated by Cern standards. We are entering a zone which is weaponised to boggle."

Simple, straightforward, pretty much correct.

Yes, this is going to come in handy.

"This javascript function can then read in the current content of the text area, format it using a trimmed down version of textile, and then set the content of a DIV with the resulting HTML. The end result of all this is live comment preview, with textile formatting." Live textile preview functionality.

"Trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact. … Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar." Why games don't always need tangible villains.

A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.

"It's just an Nintendo in a toaster, but I like it."