Category: Links

Well presented argument by Steven Pinker that we are actually living in the most peaceful period yet. Includes an explanation of zero-sum games. Via Iskander.

“build anything, and play everything, from anywhere” The ‘game’ developed by Raph Koster’s Areae has gone live.

This might be the first Star Wars game I’m looking forward to in ages – one that makes use to the Wiimote and Nunchuck.

Fun interview of William Gibson by the Boing Boing crew. I particularly enjoyed his comments on what it’s like to write SF nowadays and it reached its peak in the 60ies.

Some interesting ideas on how to combine contract work with bootstrapping an indie game company.

Last.fm are bootstrapping a new service that will be able to offer clean metadata for music based on audio fingerprints. They’ve beta’d an app that allows for seeding their database. Am downloading it now.

“Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web.” More or less created by Bill Scott of Yahoo! Interesting approach to prototyping that might come in handy some time.

Ah yes, this looks interesting. Some game-play footage from World of Goo, where you play with, well, black goo. Gotta love those indie games. Coming “soon”.

Leisa Reichelt re-explains a few of her key points on how to unify Agile with UCD. I think her suggestions make a lot of sense and are quite valuable. If I had a proper office, I would hang the slide she includes in this post on the wall!

Old footage of the great game The Neverhood. They don’t make them like this anymore. TenNapel also created Earthworm Jim and the comic GEAR. Good stuff.

“VastPark is a virtual content platform featuring free tools, revolutionary distributed content syndication and enables you to deploy your own virtual world or online game within seconds royalty free.”

Thoughts on using social networks to find suitable playmates in MMOs. I wonder wether the open social graph crowd have given this any thought – moving beyond the well-known social web into gaming territory.

Post that links to the slides of Koster’s talk at AGDC07. Scary amount of overlap in premise with my planned talk at the Euro IA Summit. Lots of very useful stuff on the gramar of games.

At this year’s Game Developer Conference, Raph explained web 2.0 to game designers and developers. This resulted in a very entertaining set of slides at least.

Very easy to follow along, even though it’s just the slides. Inspiring.

Matt Webb re-explains his concept of the experience stack, which he presented at dConstruct 2007. I for one loved the confusing nature of the talk (I don’t mind a little hard work as audience) but think this is useful nonetheless.

Fun – Ziade mocks up the interface the iPod touch *should* show when walking into a Starbucks.

Hell yes. A video of a guys playing around with Processing and a Wii Remote on his Mac. Cool stuff.

Links to resources on using the Wii Remote with Processing and Max/MSP.

More playful stuff! This is from Simon Oliver and looks great (will try this once I get my new MacBook up and running) interactive snow simulation that uses the Mac’s iSight. Kind of like EyeToy, burt artier.

The new iPod is basically a stripped down iPhone. Interesting choice to include wifi though, and the tie-in with Starbucks sounds fun though limited.

Migurski defends Twitter Blocks making the valuable point not all things need to be useful. I like the way he points out people criticizing it are already playing — they’re using Twitter for crying out loud!

Entertaining interview with the guy who set up Best Cellars, a US wine merchant that categorizes their wines on taste. Reminds me of the Dutch Grape District chain. Good example of experience design applied to retail.