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"Steven Strogatz, an award-winning professor, takes readers from the basics to the baffling in a 15-part series on mathematics. Beginning with a column on why numbers are helpful, he goes on to investigate topics including negative numbers, calculus and group theory, finishing with the mysteries of infinity." Lovely series of online articles at the NYT explaining maths. Lots of good stuff.
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"Street Fighter is about everything games are about – all you’ve learned about positioning and strategy, every reaction tightened by every sudden twitch of your trigger fingers, every educated guess made at your opponent’s next move – all played out in a simple two-dimensional box where you test everything you’ve ever known about videogames. Street Fighter IV is the same old game of two-dimensional space control, strategy, and flat-out mind reading but it took whopping great polygons in an old-fashioned game to take a 2D fighter back to the masses." This is all true.
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"To apply the same point to videogames, ‘we’ are exceptionally good at the analytic mode and extremely poor at the rhetorical persuasion. As a cohort, we’re remarkably analytical. There are not many writers, bloggers, critics, etc of videogames who are either committed to the persuasive communication of the veracity of their feelings, moods, and strange hunches about videogames, but there sure is a lot of people willing to point out the textual or dramaturgical features of XYZ latest game." This, many, many times over. It's one reason I tire of so much wordy criticism at the moment: it is exhaustive, but lacks direction. (This, for me, was the gap between my first years at university and my final year: finding the courage to make my own arguments, rather than just synthesizing everything around me).
Words appearing elsewhere
29 November 2010
Just a quick note to mention some words of mine that have appeared elsewhere.
Firstly, my Game Dev Story piece was republished over at Gamasutra. Thanks to Simon Carless for getting in touch about that; some nice comments, and a little more awareness around a bunch of things I’m ruminating quite hard on at the moment.
And secondly, I was interviewed – along with real games developers Nels Anderson and Manveer Heir – in this piece from Gamespot Australia’s Laura Parker. The articles starts by looking at Limbo (which I must admit, I am not as enamoured of as many) and going on to look at what “mainstream” games development can learn from what’s going on in the indie sector right now. My input mainly came around following some of my writing on games literacy. It’s a really strong article, and I’m sorry that it got buried on the staff blog, because it deserves a much wider audience, and I hope Laura continues to push this kind of feature writing.
That’s all for now. I’m currently writing up my talk from Interesting North which is, as usual, taking longer than expected. I mainly write longhand, but it’s amazing how long expanding on notes that say “now explain this” takes. I should have a transcript complete this week.
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"I am anxious for you and the boy's future — make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games — they encourage it at some schools — I know you will keep him out in the open air — try and make him believe in a God, it is comforting. Oh my dear my dear what dreams I have had of his future and yet oh my girl I know you will face it stoically…" Whatever his flaws, this is a remarkable piece of writing; Scott's final letters to his wife, as his Anatarctic expedition reached its close. Very sad.
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Not a bad list, especially for sites needing hardcore, tight, front-end work, and that are going to face load.
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Mitu makes a series of interesting connections here, though the conclusion she came to isn't quite the same as mine – which is in the comments. But there's a mass of starting points here as to notions of the "abstract", and what it might mean for games. Something I shall be returning to, for sure.
Broken because they were toys, and vice versa.
10 October 2010
Dylan is six or seven, and frustrated that his toys don’t live up to their promise:
If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care.
Jonathan Lethem – The Fortress of Solitude.
I’m enjoy the book a lot, but that paragraph leapt out at me early on and has been dog-eared since.
Margaret talks a lot about one possible pillar of good game design being “how is this interestingly hard?” I described this to her, and she suggested that what distinguished many (but not all) toys as toys were being things that were interestingly shit.
Of course, not all toys are; many of the very best are just genuinely interesting. I immediately leap to Lego to answer that one. But broken-in-interesting-ways allows for subversion and exploration; enjoying it not despite, but because of brokenness. Difficult-in-interesting-ways allows for mastery. Both are interesting, and worth pursuing.
And yet: reading Dylan’s disappointment, as he realises the Spirograph is just not as tolerant a device as the cover of the box suggests, I felt that same feeling in my gut; the same feeling I felt at six or seven, realised all my efforts with my Etch A Sketch were doomed to being rubbish. Interesting, but broken.
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Lovely.
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"We access that history with tools that were, almost entirely, the props of science fiction my parents might have encountered – if they read it. My phone is my sonic screwdriver, the internet my TARDIS; these are the tools with which I unlock and manipulate time."
Speeds not naturally found very often this side of celestial interaction
30 September 2010
I don’t think we’ll ever notice the age of cyborgs, because we do these things one at a time. We roll them out in small ways, and increment them across society. We quietly piece together a know-everything machine, make its connections invisible, then put it in a small box we built as a talk-to-anyone-machine, and carry it around with us. (The first and ultimate prosthetic of the species being community, and so our most powerful magics will always be incantations to one another.) We hand out drugs to everyone that make them more ready for capitalism as a warm, tasty beverage. While we talk about powersuits and armies of robots, we get into metal boxes next to explosion chambers and extend our proprioception to their edges. We do this so that we can then hurtle down ribbons of death we’ve built all around the landscape at speeds not naturally found very often this side of celestial interaction. We call this commuting and consider it one of the most boring things humans do.
Matt is right. Quinn’s contribution to 50cyborgs is wonderful; thoughtful and provocative and brimful of good stuff. You should go read it right away.
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"Far Cry 2 invites fatalism, pessimism, and near-suicidal tactics because optimism and strategy went on holiday to Leboa-Sako and got murdered just like everything else. Hoping for the best doesn’t work. Being clever doesn’t work. Nothing good will ever happen to you in Far Cry 2′s Africa, and none of your carefully-designed plans will ever bear fruit."
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"The optical future of architectural ornament: light with content. <br />
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That is, you get home with your digital camera and you click back through to see what you've photographed—and there are words, shapes, and objects hovering there in the street, or inside the buildings you once stood within, visual data only revealed through long-exposures." Brilliant. -
"After seeing there is a turing complete language in game, I felt like I should do something interesting with redstone in Minecraft. People already have done clocks and adders so I wanted to do something a little different while also be potentially useful. As a result, I designed out a ticker display." At least as crazy as those LittleBigPlanet calculators.
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"Nelson, as described by IDEO in the video above, does so much work for you. It throws multiple perspectives into the equation, killing the unreliable narrator with the gifts of foresight and hindsight. It does away with the unexplainable appeal of a surprising hit novel giving you a league table of books to pick from according to their “impact on popular opinion and debate.” You’ll struggle to form your own opinion as you jump through the layers that Nelson offers you, given a perspective like a student browbeaten by an overbearing A-Level tutor." I similarly disliked their attempts to not only redesign the book, but to try to redesign narrative, in "Alice" – as if people hadn't tried, and as if what narrative _really_ needed was just a good design firm to take a crack at it.