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Jolly good interview with Tim Sweeney, with lots on ZZT (hurrah!), and, I think most interestingly lots of on building games around editors and tools – from ZZT through Unreal to the present day. I like his acknowledgments of his shortcomings as a progammer – but perhaps also his shrewdness as a manager.
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"They preserve them as best they can, perhaps without even knowing that’s what they’re doing, but in the understanding that no archives may be kept, no histories written, and that what sustains their digital lives is the lived-out, written-down, spoken word." Reminds me of the "what five pages would you print out" conundrum, and the end of Fahrenheit 451; walking the woods, chanting entries from Encyclopedia Dramatica
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Well Played is now out, and can be read online and purchased from Lulu. It's exactly the sort of thing I've wanted for a while – a reader for videogames, and for the actual experiential side of them – and it's got some great authors contributing pieces on a host of games. Worth your time, for sure.
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"I’ve never seen this visualization before. Whoever created it should be publicly applauded." Yes.
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"Another word for "pacing" is "storytelling". We never really tell stories to players; we just put them in games. Then players tell our stories to themselves." Interesting analysis of pacing in games, and what the demands games make on pace are. And, of course, that quotation.
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"Jarate is neither affiliated with, nor a substitute for, Karate." The Sniper's new weapon: a jar of piss. The way this update has unfolded has, basically, been totally awesome.
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God, Nethack is far, far, far too complicated. This only reminds me why I hated it so much (compared to Rogue, or even Larn).
A new life awaits you in the Offworld colonies…
08 May 2009
Old news, but worth an announcement: I now appear to be doing some semi-regular writing for Offworld, the Boing-Boing stable’s wonderful gamesblog. As well as making the odd post from time to time, I also seem to be writing a regular feature entitled Something For The Weekend, which each week looks at one game – which you can play right now – that I’m going to be spending some time with over the coming weekend.
So far, it’s covered Outrun Online Arcade and The Chronicles of Riddick; this week takes a turn for the indie with Popcap’s awesome Plants Vs Zombies.
If you’ve not been reading Offworld, do check it out; Brandon – the esteemed editor – is a lovely chap, it’s got some fantastic regular contributors (including comrades Rossignol, Robertson, and Parkin), a great take on the world of games and game culture that really marks it out from most of the other gamesblogs there, and a lot of fine writing. In short: worth your time.
Service announcement over. You may return to the rest of your RSS feeds.
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"They're like triple-A games, but trimmed down and tightened to fit a smaller team, smaller scope, and usually a smaller audience– to try new, interesting, and exciting approaches that the baggage of a triple-A game can almost never allow. Single-A games: they're what we need more of, and they're what The Path and Zeno Clash are outstanding examples of." I like your coinage, Steve.
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Mike Darga's blog is a smart, insightful, data-driven look at game design, especially for MMOs. It's very good, and goes straight into my subscriptions.
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"Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. Import your movies, tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr and Vimeo. You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy." Looks like an interesting alternative to iMovie for most of the uses I make of video.
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Scans from a German magazine: messy, full of records, sometimes computers.
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"Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from my favorite era, the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context–make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large–and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood's approach to the concept has been, from a biologist's perspective, hopelessly naïve." Fantastic: transcripts of a series of lectures about the biology of B-Movie monsters; funny, accurate, informative.
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Map of Shanghai, as Sim-City style rendered projection; is this useful? Or is this just a style of imagery computer users are used to?
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"I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived." Fantastic.
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"Sweet Sue's Canned Whole Chicken (without giblets) is an entire cooked chicken in a can (a big one)." For reference: I am not whole chicken-in-a-can hungry.
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"The Twiggy Game is a charming cultural object from a bygone era; it's also a stark representation of what went wrong with boardgames, and a stark warning for what can go wrong with games as a whole — at least, if we fail to inculcate, in ourselves and in others who love games, an aesthetic that prizes something beyond the brand." Costikyan on the dangers of games having a 'lack of culture'.
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"That is not to say that videogames need to be more sensationalist, more vulgar, or more crass, but that they need not fear being more transgressive, or more expressive, or more visceral. They need not to shy away from their darker depictions of our fantasies, or become embarrassed when people point out how they dwell on violence and excitement. This, the safe excursion to the gladiatorial arena, is what games do best." Rossignol on Ballard, and jolly good too.
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"So, is it possible to mix segments and querystring?" Sort of, maybe, seems to be the answer.
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"The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more." Rands drops some Keynote science, and I learn at least one new thing.
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Even if it's got a long way to go, there's so much promise and potential here – and it's interesting to see how refined some of the puzzle ideas are. And: mind-bending in the way the best puzzle games are.
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"I'm looking forward to working with new, clever people and getting my hands dirty again. I'm charged with leading the Open Library into fresh, fun territory; to enlist many hands to make "a page on the web for every book ever published" a great resource. I'm thrilled to be working with Brewster Kahle and his crack team in an important time for books on the web." What a perfect hire. Can't wait to see what George brings to it.
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This is epic and brilliant and has so many jumping-off points I need to read it again, and again, and again.
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"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""
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Pop band from Bristol, made good singles, got a deal, rather than touring recorded an album, album got shelved by label that had wanted them to tour, band broke up, album now sees light of day from SVC, for three quid. Phew!