"Starting a new column reprinting classic Game Developer magazine articles, this January 1994 premiere issue article goes behind the scenes of Id Software's Doom, talking to John Carmack and revealing technical specifics of the seminal game's creation." And it's cracking – lots of great detail, some neat ironies, and quite a bit about the id team's fondness for NeXT workstations.

Consolevania is over. A shame, but they make their case well, and it was lovely when it lasted.

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"Your argument did not address my own, but nice try". I think I'm going to need this in future.

These are lovely. The more I think about this, the more I like his Die Hard poster.

"The purpose of this analysis is to determine the evolution of gravity in the Mario video game series as video game hardware increases." Not super-accurate, but not bad; the bit when it starts the comparison against GPU word length is a little silly, perhaps. But otherwise: fun!

"I have plenty of great uses for bacon in a barbecue pit, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys. Behold, BACON EXPLOSION!!!" Oh sweet jesus.

"Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune. Betting the wrong way, Adolf Merckle took his life." A powerful example of how much you can lose when shorting goes wrong.

"Instead of encouraging you to join a group, find new friends, or spread the word, Burger King’s new Whopper Sacrifice Application is offering you a free Whopper if you DE-FRIEND 10 people from your friend list." Um.

Two hours of HD Dwarf Fortress tutorials. Will they make it any easier? No idea, but it's got to be a start.

"We spend a lot of time talking about games and films, but a much more useful corollary is music. The processes are spookily similar. Creators devise an experience, and commit it to code. The code then sits there, lifeless, until a performer picks it up. Then, through a complex tool which requires substantial manual dexterity to master, the performer interprets the experience the creator devised. No two people will play the code the same way. Some players will perform better than others. Some will get stuck and give up before the end."

"in the meantime, I decided to do an absolutely crucial bit of game science. Something that I am entirely sure is mulled over constantly, but never properly investigated. The question is but stated thusly: how long would it take the Little Prince to roll up an entire room based on a random path algorithm?" Julian is having fun.

"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"

"For all the talk of immersion and realism it seems gamers still want games that provide for them, that make them the centre of the action, the pivotal agent in the events of the world, the nexus around which everything is focused." And this is one of the big conflicts within games: you have to make the player feel wanted whilst they're playing the game, make them feel the centre of attention, because without them the game is nothing. But at the same time: can you still tell stories that aren't about them? I expand a little in the comment on the blogpost proper.

"Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations… Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable." Could be useful.

Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.

"..some tweets were destined for fail." – or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.

"I’d recommend that if you’re considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design and recognize that when you build a “desktop in the web browser”-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption." Yes.

Video from the side of a solidrocket booster from a shuttle launch – through launch, into the atmosphere, separation, and back down to splashdown. Incredible; hypnotic; magical to think that we made that.

"The first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March 2009 as part of Newcastle ScienceFest – a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation." Never been to Newcastle. That could be exciting.

"Don't be stuck staring at the screen! Mightier's unique puzzles are designed to be solved by hand with pencil and paper." You print out the puzzle, solve it with a pen, take a webcam picture of it… and the in-game laser carves the path you drew. Wow.

"A dude by the name of Phoebus has posted a collection of his research on Left 4 Dead's infected and weapon damage statistics over on the official Steam forums. I think that it'll be of great interest for any serious player of the game to delve into this information." There's a question over their accuracy, but there's still a decent amount of detail here, and the details on tail-off of weapon damage is useful to know. Also a relief to have the hellacious friendly-fire damage on Expert confirmed.

Fascinating to watch some of the body shapes – the hunched run, and in particular the the saut du chat – carry through to modern Parkour; that which is practical has always been so. As with all parkour: parts of it are beautiful, parts of it entertaining, and parts of it superhuman.

"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of." More on this topic from Jones; still think there's something we're not quite hitting yet, but it's all good stuff.

Stack lets you subscribe to a selection of independent magazines; you choose how many you want a year, and they send you a selection. A really nice idea, although it'll be interesting to see them broaden their horizons a bit.

"Program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious." Chef is a programming language where the programs are also valid (if strange) recipes. The syntax description is proper crazy; gives Homespring a run for its money, easily, in the realm of metaphorical programming languages that embrace their metaphor.

"This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person."

"The Napbook is a laptopcase which also happens to be a comfortable cushion." I could do with one right now.

"I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colours", a pixelated Cthuluesque love-hate story. Sweet; overwritten, but the core mechanics is nice, and the pace of the game is very soothing.

Some interesting visualisations of the way forum threads on dpreview – which has nested threads in posts – grow and progress. Interesting for the patterns it throws up, and somewhat useful, if only for rough, high-level analysis.

Bonkers. It's a man, dressed as something a bit like a slinky, and it broke me a little.

"…most public objects – and certainly all municipal objects – should offer APIs. Furthermore, specifically with regard to public infrastructures like transit systems, I believe that this should be a matter of explicit government policy. What’s a public object? A sidewalk. A building facade. A parking meter. Any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public. Any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way. Any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessible to the public, regardless of its ownership or original intention. How’s that for starters?"

Better than GetBundle, apparently – hunts down unofficial bundles on github and the like, as well. Nifty.

"What a wonderful idea," Jennifer noted. "We never get to see the people who make the games." Michael Abbott is talking about LittleBigPlanet.

Leanoard rounds up his favourite DS homebrew games. Some good stuff in here that I didn't know of.

"This is just one of many examples that show you can participate in online community without having to pretend to be something you’re not. In fact, participating with authenticity is not just morally good, it’s measurably more effective."

Powazek is right; this is definitely smart advertising, and full props to EA/W+K for just taking the credit and not trying to make it "viral"; it'll do that anyway. Although: it really is a glitch, you know.

"We've seen this all before… [but] these Smule globes seem strangely different and much more interesting, largely I think because you hold the phone in your hand instead of the laptop or monitor on your desk. It's a more personal, touched engagement with the screen that makes visualizing an earth-spanning army of phone lighters and flute blowers more physically personal."

"But succeed or fail, my awareness of game design is omnipresent, and I like it that way. It enriches my experience of playing. The in-world experience remains my first thought, but my second thought is nearly always focused on the system, especially when that system demonstrates originality or beautiful execution. I don't think I'm the only gamer who behaves this way." No, but it requires a certain degree of awareness of the medium to think about the second; the first is much more immediate, and the second is about an engagements with games, rather than a particular game.

"If I only have so many hours in the day to devote to genuinely insightful things, Gladwell’s track record screams at me to ignore Outliers. At least for now. At least until I’m stuck on a cross-country flight, liquored up, and ready for a good fight." Jack Shedd is bored of anecdotes.

"This is a lexicon of terms relating to John Horton Conway's Game of Life." Very comprehensive, with lots of examples.

Ignoring the background music and a lot of Trajan, I really like this series of pictures from Brooks Reynolds; particularly, his use of lighting and depth of field. I'm a big fan of concept-series; they tend to be more than a sum of their parts.

I don't care that it's not playing the game or anything, there is no way in the world that this is anything less than super-awesome.

Some really beautiful in-house design from Criterion here.

"We’re just topping it off with the last few drops of smooth liquid goo, but the Mac version of World of Goo is running beautifully, and should be out this week!" Very excited.

"Japan-o-glitch + Interactive Flash graphics = D.V.D. (x OMG)." Wow.