Category: Links

Schulze and Webb continue to kick ass. This social radio prototype for the BBC really excites me — interaction design thinking native to the web applied to physical products. Awesome!

Jyri contributes to the portable social network debate with a long post that points to some new (at least for me) sources.

Vinh is reprinting his Hel-Fucking-Vetica t-shirt. Missed out the first time. Gotta get me one of those.

Let’s hope this is an accurate representation of what Castlevania the movie is going to be like. Crazy fun thanks to Warren Ellis.

Cool clay model of a dinosaur with a rocket launcher on his back. Apparently a character in an indie game by Intuition.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Dana Gordon and Alejandro Zamudio Sánchez have revamped The Hungries – a family of toy monsters who go about recording and playing sounds using their own voices.

Its seems like the good old Gamasutra is enjoying a renaissance lately, with a lot of decent articles being posted. Like the ones pointed to in this post, on working in the Japanese games biz.

Karsten links to an awesome video of Eben Moglen giving Tim O’Reilly a hard time at his own conference. Besides being entertaining, it offers some great insights into what’s really at stake with ‘free’ software.

Enjoyable little interview with Gibson, who’s come out of hiding now that his new book has been published. Looking forward to reading it, although nothing will top the impact Neuromancer first made.

Finally a descent QuickSilver action that allows you to update presence on both Jaiku and Twitter. *Relief*

Nice talk by Porter where he gathers up some prominent psychological thinking to give insight into the workings of social software.

Bogost’s Persuasive Games gets a Wii developer license but are unsure about whether to actually invest time in such an obscure console…

A look at what makes a good synthesizer. Via Alexandra.

Gaal is organizing a portable social networks meet up somewhere around PICNIC. Curious to see what might come out of it.

Blog post on the wooden wall in the office of Connecta, where I’m spending quite some time lately. Pretty…

Croft’s celebration of ‘subtlety’ in visual design makes me shudder. Is this the subtlety that gave us barely readable grey-on-white text? Very ‘professional’ indeed. Give me contrast any day.

The new Jaiku client launches and gets some good press. Shame I don’t have 3rd edition S60 phone…

GSW points to a series of discussions about the future of short-session gaming. They stress the importance of effortless delivery and mention two different small game genres (twitch and think).

“The future of games, especially ones delivered over the internet, is providing not just a finished product, but a continued service.” Interesting thoughts on the future of casual game portals.

Not sure I bookmarked this the first time around. I’ve hardly ever seen the joys of iterative processes been explained in such a concise and fun way. Good stuff.

Drew McLellan leaves Yahoo!: “It seems that the people at the very bottom of the company really get the web, and honestly a lot of the execs right at the very top seem to get it. In the middle is a great swamp of middle management where good ideas go to d

Trouble with his Nintendo Wii lead Cable of Panic to the discovery of the Wii Help Cat – contextual help you’ve got to catch.

Entertaining interview with Chris Crawford. Too bad he’s turned his back on the games industry, I think there’s plenty of room for innovation there.

Koster reacts to the Slate article on serious games and thinks the future is less bleak than they describe.

Koster on how to design serious games: “… start with something that users care about, and just take care to select a goal that naturally offers up the sorts of challenges that we want to teach.”

Slate article on the state of serious games – the author feels most of the current efforts start the wrong way around, they should first come up with something fun and then add educational elements.

Ian Bogost describes his philosophy in creating ‘persuasive games’ – he wants to design games for non-gamers, people who have very different expectations of what a game experience can be.

Great analysis of a freaky Wii feature called the Help Cat. Excellent example of merging game mechanics with interaction design.

Another look at the serious games phenomenon. I like the example of PopCap building a zen mode into their games for casual players who just want to zone out.

Line Rider is getting a release on the Wii and DS. Turns out the creator got its physics from a Gamasutra article.

Powazek rightly criticizes Apple for competing by keeping certain product features to themselves.

Short presentation that showcases some game mechanics used in an online user research tool.

Another example of how the games and internet industries are converging. There’s just so many opportunities for social technologist in the games industry right now, they’re really only beginning to understand how to foster community.

Everybody’s doing it: Ben Hammersley switches to an all web workspace (includes some links to people who’ve done the same.)

Cabel of Panic gets a fabject Mii and a personalized Wii remote. Awesome geekery!

These guys ‘3D print’ Miis and 2nd Life characters. Oh yes.

Hans recommends a book on scale-free networks. Looks interesting, it’s on my to read list (together with a zillion other books I hope to read some day).

Crazy Flash game with good art and a nice dose of violent humour.

Very pretty point and click adventure game made in Flash.

Ahhh this looks sweet. A CSS framework that includes a grid and typography but no bloat. Gonna use this on a next project.

AquaBrowser is partnering with LibraryThing to seed their folksonomy product for libraries.

Veen thinks the web can be made better when location is assumed.

LibraryThing discover the joys of the Dutch web scene and cannot help but mentioning soft drugs. Sigh.

MacManus proves he doesn’t get mobile at all. Better browsers on mobile devices are nice but no substitute for mobile services that are designed with the user’s context in mind.