Category: Links

“This is the first serious long-term plan I’ve ever had. I figure, Shit, I’m a guy with long term plans now? I need to re-roll my character sheet.” Totally enjoyable interview that all of a sudden has me itching to chew on some math.

Enjoyable Gibson interview. The bit about weaponized gear kind of freaked me out.

This Ronald Rietveld character sounds like a priest of the school of Stewart Brand & Jane Jacobs. “Architecture is interaction design.” Well not always, but it certainly can be.

“Play, not work, seems to be the defining essence of life on earth.” Although I think work-play is a false dichotomy, I can certainly get behind the idea of play as a worthless thing that is at the same time extremely valuable.

“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.

Lovely short story by Bruce Sterling about a future gift economy. The system he describes works great as a literary device but for it to work in real life I think it would require some discernible feedback for individual users.

“play more games, make more games” Tom is right.

“they’re just finite (indeed, crappy) little pretexts – alongside other pretexts like gift-giving, sharing/curating, commenting/expressing – to help us engage in the potentially infinite social communication that something like Facebook (or more generally the internet) affords.” One of many gems to be found in this elaborate Wonderlab report from Mr. Kane.

I wonder when this will become fashion.

Margaret shares some notes on te design decisions behind Couple Up, a card game created at a recent Hide & Seek event in London. I found the ideas on how to help players get into performance interesting.

“Cities are the world’s experimental laboratories and thus a metaphor for an uncertain age. They are both the cancer and the foundation of our networked world, both virus and antibody.” A headspinning tour of contemporary urbanisation. I am still trying to figure out what opportunities this creates for forward thinking games designers.

“It’s the playful spirit of the game that’s more important than the letter of the rules. Which is as it should be. Jane McGonigal says reality is broken and let’s fix it with game, a whiff of formalin in the air. Her lens on the world is rather monocular, fundamentalist in the proper sense of the word. It rarely admits failure and dreams of a superhumanity. But I think I can do no better than make play with people, and forcing them into one game they don’t want to play is like trying to choreograph butterflies.” Pure gold.

“When artists become interested in sport, “they become terribly anxious that they could be confused with the quote-unquote normal fans,” said Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and author of “In Praise of Athletic Beauty” (Belknap Press, 2006). “So intellectuals, when they play games, they cannot just play normal games. It has to be intellectualized.”” Guilty as charged I guess. But when are these ‘new sports’ art, when are they design and when are they just mucking about?

“We need first to acknowledge that today’s players are aware of the magic circle – they are often willfully and happily partially within it and playing conceptually with their sense of presence therein at any given moment, regardless of how immersive the game is. Second, we need to offer them more than the mere ability to enter and exit that circle. We need to let them touch it, manipulate it, and explore and test its limits.” I object to some of the stereotypes in this essay, and have trouble grasping what is meant by the term “immersive sim”. But I can only agree with the point that anything of importance in a game should be in something a player can act on. The rest, frankly, is dressing.

Although I object to some of the blanket statements about the nature of video games (all of them being spatial, for instance) I do think this overview of urban games and how they relate to urban computing is comprehensive and quite interesting.

Lovely photos of the curious patterns that can emerge from suburbs. Of interest because I’ve been toying with an idea to make a game about glyphs in urban landscapes. “We are living amidst geometry, post-terrestrial screens between ourselves and the planet we walk upon.”