Tumblr – Page 2 – Leapfroglog

“I was reading David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook, and there’s a passage in there where he points out that there’s this convention amongst top-flight chefs,” he continues. “They are all expected to offer their own personal take on two basic standards: bread service, and an egg dish. These foods are so neutral in flavour and so dependent on technique that you can use them to analyze the difference between chefs as artists.”

“And I reflected on what that would mean for game designers. I decided that we should all make our own versions of Pong (which is eggs), and chess (which is definitely bread),” Foddy suggests. “I would strongly recommend it as an exercise to anyone in a creative field—figure out what the bread is, and what the eggs are, and then give them your best shot. It’s a great way of figuring out your own identity as a creator.”

(via Gamasutra – The very good reasons for Bennett Foddy’s mad Speed Chess)

I’ve been tracking the emergence of a “play ethic” in the internet of things / connected products field for a while because most of the projects are so damn utilitarian. This new series of works by Brendan about email is kind of interesting in that regard. Lana in particular is nice because it appears to “contain” email and spits it back at you in a sort of random manner.

(via Brendan Dawes – Six Monkeys)

He credited his friend and fellow artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan with showing him that WikiLeaks and the NSA actually have a very similar view of the world. “They both believe there’s a massive secret out there, and if they just get hold of the secret everything will be better,” Bridle said.

Been working on a card game about drone surveillance and warfare for a while now and James’s work has been a big influence. Nobody I know has put as much thought in the implications of these technologies through making things as he has.

(via This Artist’s Database Compiles All Known Data on the Drone Wars | Motherboard)

we might get to a space where nobody really cares if a “real” object really “exists” at all; a spime can probably be made to exist if enough energy is thrown at it, and the real social issue is figuring out how to get rid of them, not to invent them or conjure them up

(via Futures? a short interview with Bruce Sterling — pasta and vinegar)

We didn’t do the things that tech companies were supposed to do. We didn’t move fast and break things. We didn’t disrupt and abandon. We didn’t do moon shots. We created a future by sitting the world down with a cup of tea and a bun and asking it some questions.

Infovore » The Shipping Forecast

I’ve spent a lot of time watching dogs playing and it’s been a source of fascination and happiness for years. So the subject matter felt really natural to me. But as a game designer, I find the dynamics of how dogs play together really interesting. Dogs are expert players. Dog play is made of all these ritualized moments of violence and dominance, but when it’s healthy play, it doesn’t cross the line into real violence. Dogs are really good at regulating their play. Playing and playing well is this really deep instinct for dogs, and I thought it would be interesting to try to pull some of that into a game for humans. Healthy dog play isn’t about defeating a bunch of opponents — it’s about having fun above all, while simulating all these really dark and dangerous real-life situations and working out social relationships.

So the pretentious idea at the heart of Dog Park is to make a game that has all kinds awesome “fighting” in it that’s not about defeating your enemies. It’s about how we work together, by pretending to fight each other, by competing with each other, to create enjoyment for each other. In other words, it’s about trying to turn my players into dogs, for a few minutes at a time.

(via » Kevin Cancienne)

There’s a lesson here. The greatest thing I learned from my formalist training in painting was actually not about painting. It was about the nature of knowledge itself: what it means to define a creative practice as a craft, or as a discipline, or as a set of ideas, and how such a practice relates to culture at large. In other words, the important thing to ask is not What is painting? or What is game design? Instead, the real question is: What is gained and what is lost when we define it in a particular way?

(via How I Teach Game Design. (Lesson 3: Games and Rules) | being playful)

Superstition, myth, and religion offer rationales that fill in the empty spaces between performance and results. Their sorcery acts as a mortar that plugs the gaps between the physical and mental bricks that form the walls of our performances. Without that glue, the edifice would crumble. For peak performance, superstition isn’t a defect but a necessity.

(via Swing Copters: The Randomness of the Universe, Captured in Pixels – The Atlantic)

“Playing a song changes your understanding of it. Playing music changes how you listen to it. Doing changes knowing.”

Great piece on how the internet is facilitating a new literacy of media production. Doing definitely changes knowing. However, I disagree old structures of power and access are no longer in place on the internet. And I also disagree learning to play a song on a guitar is the same as “learning” to post a tweet. There’s a different relationship between the tool, the media and the person going on there.

(via Doing is knowing: “Sweet Jane” and the Web — Wordyard)

“Mana did not make it into the D&D rulebook because Gary Gygax and the other creators of D&D based their magic system on the novels of Jack Vance, where a limited number of spells could be memorized, cast once, and then forgotten.”

One of many amazing insights into how the concept of mana made its way from Polynesian antiquity into today’s gamer culture.

(via The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic—Vol. 2, No. 2—The Appendix)