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.”