links for 2010-09-08

“There are men­tal spaces which in some ways cor­re­spond to exter­nal phys­i­cal space but in oth­er ways cer­tain­ly don’t. One such men­tal space, what I’ve called ‘charged space’, seems to have devel­oped over the past cen­tu­ry or so. It tries to rep­re­sent how we respond as a whole to the phys­i­cal world—through all our sens­es, our whole body and our imag­i­na­tion. It’s thick, flu­id and immer­sive, it’s set in motion by its occu­pants, and it’s kept in flux by invis­i­ble flows and fields of force.” Read­ing this I feel there is still a lot of untapped poten­tial in the area of non­de­ter­min­is­tic, non­euclid­i­an data­spaces use­ful for unstruc­tured thought.

“who decides the mean­ing of a game? The design­er, or the play­er?” clear­ly argued piece on the rela­tion­ship between a game’s mechan­ics and it’s theme. Should be basic fare for game design­ers but there are still a lot of mis­un­der­stand­ings about this in the industry.