Category: Links

Cook on the need to embrace failure in the creative process.

Johnson compares average words per sentence and % complex words for himself and a number of writers. Fun stuff.

Wish I could participate in this London Games Festival fringe event: a 5-day cross-disciplinary game design workshop.

Great idea: create scarcity around meeting time with wooden tokens. Can’t wait for these to go on sale. Although I might just make some myself. However, nowadays I’m not as swamped with meetings as I used to be. Which is a good thing, of course.

The LIFT08 program looks great – they even have a full ‘track’ dedicated to gaming. But it overlaps with Interaction 08… Nooo!

Keith reacts to the ignorant comments on accessibility of SitePoint and Techcrunch visitors with some links to inspirational accessibility-related content.

A bit of a rehash of his earlier work titled ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us’ this video by Mike Wesch explains the alleged needlessness of categories on the web.

A bit of an alarmist video by Mike Wesch that nonetheless effectively communicates how students are forced to leave behind their media-saturated environment when they enter the typical classroom.

“Newtoon is a collaborative project between Futurelab and Soda Creative that is designed to encourage young people to explore the laws of physics in a creative and engaging manner through mobile gaming.”

An opensource clone of Guitar Hero. Srsly. Via Asbjørn.

Juul points to the applicability of this year’s Nobel prize in economics – mechanism design theory – in MMOG design and asks wether anyone actually applies economic game theory. My guess is some savvy social software designers might.

“This is a collaborative project of The Guardian’s gamesblog community. The aim is simply to create the greatest group-generated text adventure in the world ever.”

“You really gotta do this.” On the virtues of active participation in the dev process as a designer. Totally agree with this,

Trailer for a cool-looking indie platform game involving the manipulation of a 3D level a la Crush…

Demo of a facetted navigation on steroids – using Flash to give additional feedback on each facet’s values.

Short piece by Shirky on the need for a balance between arrogance and humility and design.

Fun analysis of Katamari Damacy stating that because Katamari criticizes modern society, it is deserving of criticism itself.

Ian Bogost takes a closer look at what the term casual in casual games actually means and comes up with some interesting ideas on unexplored terrain in casual gaming. Specifically games that you play once for a short while, never play again and forget about.

If Doctorow’s goal with this piece was to scare people into not trusting Google anymore. He’s more or less succeeded with me.

Pretty impressive web-based photo-editor that does one thing Pixelmator doesn’t: Constrained cropping. Pulls in photos from Flickr and others. Very well-executed.

A toy that reacts to sounds. I want one!

Tom Armitage analyses the reactions of Flickr users to the Talk Like A Pirate Day version of the site. I wasn’t aware of the negative reactions of some (enjoyed it myself) but guess it makes sense.

Bernard Vehmeyer points to an excellent documentary film on copyright titled Good Copy Bad Copy and provides a great summary to boot. This docu deserves a wide spread, pass it along and while you’re at it donate some dough to the makers.

This is just too sweet. Star Wars inspired gear from Marc Ecko…

Merholz wraps up the major themes of IDEA 2007. Apparently all the sessions have been recorded, might be worth looking up.

I can only agree with Li that the DS (and other gaming platforms) are great sources of inspiration for IxDs.

Fun little rant on the dodgy design of the new five dollar bill.

Greenfield on the charms of Dutch bikes. He points to a photo taken near the workplace I just left. Back in DK, the riding style is different, lots of crazies speeding on city-bikes. Myself being one of them.