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."

"i have made an "electronic" 8bit calculator (not "mechanical" calculator) with the Beta LBP demo.it do decimal/binary conversions and it can do Add and Sub… computation take clearly less that a half second. this calculator use: – 610 magnetic switches – 500 Wires – 430 pistons – 70 emitters and others stuff…" Amazing – especially the pan-out to the whole contraption.

"The big dilemma is that needs are different. I’m normally on Mobile Google Maps when I’m frantically trying to find a place, often the hotel I’ve booked. I’m lost, I want to sleep – I’m not exploring the possibility space, and I don’t want to wade through marketing garbage. Note that this doesn’t make sense for these kinds of advertisers either: I’ve booked already, and I don’t want alternatives." Once again, the problems of the mobile context (rather than the mobile technology) rear their heads.

"On April 1, 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page “special report” about San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of this obscure nation." Wonderful

Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).

"The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order – jugglers and prostitutes for example – and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." Wow. I did not know that.

"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" Amazing.

"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."

Yes.

"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.

Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights – other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.

Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous – especially at 900-weight.

"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.

"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.