I wrote a story once about a girl with a beard and her adventures with beard-sprouting paste. Needless to say, I'm in love with these kid-sized beards from Erin Dollar.
A Studio Ghibli style game for the Playstation 3. I love the little lantern-nose guy. I'll put this one in the time-travel gift package for my 10 year old self.
Eric at Elder Game describes an ability in his indie MMO -- you can "discover" (inflict, really) a random vulnerability on a monster. But to keep the power balanced, not all of the vulnerabilities are useful to know. "I fight a giant wasp whose only weakness is a crippling fear of success."
This is two Bransford posts in a row, but he identifies two ingredients of a memorable setting that I hadn't thought about before. He observes a good setting is a place where change is underway, and is a place that has its own values.
Agent Nathan Bransford observes that the popularity of e-books and self-publishing means that prospective authors will no longer have to deal with being turned down, but like most web page authors will have to learn to do without fame.
"I have a naive, quasi-religious faith in the capacity of people to resolve problems, borne of three decades plowed into interactive power fantasies and utopian science fiction. It's left me more or less paralyzed by the world-as-it-is." -Tycho
"The Big Bang was not an explosion of matter into space, rather it was an explosion of space." As I read each sentence in this introductory overview of the creation of the universe, I thought, oh yes, I knew that. But it was still refreshing to learn it all again.
Nick Tam discusses the evolution of strategies in games like World of Warcraft where other players expect you to copy popular strategies and will exclude you if you don't.
"We see evolutionary change occur in games when the benefits of copying others far outweigh the qualitative value of making your own choices from scratch. This is a jarring philosophy of play when you consider that figuring things out for yourself is the central pleasure of games and puzzles that are free of social selective pressure." I think it's a mistake to say this phenomenon of "social pressure to fit accepted roles" makes WoW itself an evolution game, because you can play everything but the group raids without caring about optimum strategies. But it's an interesting post that I'll probably be mulling over for a while.
A consultant discovers he is a highly-paid piece of a cargo cult. "Burning out isn’t just about work load, it's about work load being greater than the motivation to do work."
Gabe throws his D&D players back in time, not just in the game world, but in the game rules. Their transported characters will be playing under the Original D&D rules. Take care of your hit points, both of them! (Scroll down to see Gabe's entry.)
These are classic screenwriting pieces of advice (e.g. every scene must be about a character struggling to get what s/he wants; in a visual medium, pretend the characters can't speak) but it's good to revisit them. Mostly I like the line "Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in Bel Air *and* hire someone to live there for you."
Sirlin tells an encouraging story about the difference in spirit between the social (money-driven) game conference and its indie twin. But mostly I want to highlight the story of the evil online slot machine that in addition to random prizes also awards the biggest prize to whoever played the most that day...
Limit structured activities. Expose yourself to new things. Follow up on what catches your eye. From Study Hacks, the web site that always makes me want to be 14 again, armed this time with a plan.
Sewing buttons are about the outer limit of my handiness, if you don't count assembling a computer. Okay, I stained an armoire once. But if I take the lessons of this detailed guide to heart I can sharpen my button-sewing skills and be prepared for the collapse of civilization. Tim Buttonsewer, I will be. Note the warning in the sidebar: this buttonsewing guide is not professional financial advice.
When I was a philosophy undergrad and a sf reader, I took it for granted that the way we would build minds in machines was by simulating biological brains, not by planning and writing the software for consciousness. But I was surprised to learn today that people have been working on this very project since 2005. The Blue Brain project has simulated a rat's neocortical column in software: "10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them." Whether or not the project will scale to an entire rat's brain, or a human's brain, seems to be an empirical problem: modern computers aren't powerful enough yet. But the project continues.
A student shared this HD time lapse photo series of Vancouver. The music's not to my taste, but I will always be lost to any scene where mist envelopes towers. Vancouver does seem like a dream city sometimes, and for this post I'll forget I've ever thought otherwise. Do view one of the full-screen HD versions.
The U.S. Supreme Court now says corporations can spend what they like on political advertising. Matt Yglesias observes that Bank of America spent .3 billion on marketing in 2008. That's almost six times what was spent on all Senate campaigns combined in 2004. They could swamp any Senator they wanted. And they're just one company.
I had written off the cloud gaming service of OnLive as something I'd love to see, alongside robot cars and butlers. But saints alive, this presentation makes it seem like it might happen. And the cloud allows much more than hardware savings. You can watch other people play, see broadcasts from top players, record brag clips. I want to believe.
Bruce Sterling: "The cheapest and most effective method of
geo-engineering is to cut the world's population in half.
Just a tremendous massacre. ... When and if it becomes obvious that we truly need massive, ultra-costly geo-engineering interventions, that we have no other choice, then somebody -- likely some traumatized veterans of weather havoc who are full of Al Qaeda self-righteousness -- they're gonna cut emissions in half by cutting people in half."
The creator of Canabalt shares some ideas about what makes a video game hard for non-gamers (one interesting answer: gravity) and how designers might make their games enjoyable for a wider audience. Smart, straight-forward analysis.
The discipline and strategizing on display here make me marvel I ever received a degree at all. An impressive and motivating site. Here's the site's list of favourite posts
We're outgrowing our family tent and will need a new one next season. Much as I love wee backpacker gear in the abstract, the new one will be a car-camping behemoth with a bathtub floor, stadium seating, a great room, a fire pit, and a bear rug made out of recycled polystyrene.
Game developer Flashbang reduced their working hours to 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and saw productivity rise. Many other fascinating lessons in this account of the studio that made games on an 8-week development cycle.
The quiz company Renaissance Learning lists word counts for a wide variety of children's books. I was surprised to see how far off some of my estimates were. Found at author Cheryl Rainfield's site, who also has a more complicated way to pry the information from some Amazon listings.
Grant Achatz is a top-level chef and restaurant owner from a family line of the same. In 2007, in the middle of treatment for cancer of the tongue, he sampled a sauce in his restaurant and realized he couldn't taste a thing. This is his essay, written with Abbazia di Novacella, about how he cooks now and makes new discoveries about flavours and pairings.
One of the inventors of the Toyota Production System suggests asking "why?" five times to uncover and fix the root causes of a problem. Eric Ries gives a helpful example, applying the lessons to a web site that's gone down.
I'm long out of Magic: The Gathering, but I still found myself eyeing their concepts and paintings for the new series. Scroll down to the physics-defying landscapes at the bottom. There's also big concept art paintings and a guide to the world.
The most interesting reason for me was the ability to track how people are using your program (with A/B testing if appropriate) and improve it immediately. I end up recommending online apps to my novice students for everything these days, even cropping photos. Removing installation and version worries makes it so much easier to guide them.
Tim Schafer shares the story of how he started in the games industry, including how he accidentally confessed to piracy during his interview, and drew the pictures for his job application (you heard me) on his KoalaPad.
I don't own a Playstation 3, but the dungeon exploration game is doing some unusual things with multiplayer in what is primarily a single player game. You can see where other players have died and even watch ghostly replays of what happened. You can leave messages for other players to find. You can appear in other player's games briefly as a helpful or harmful silent spirit. (Scroll down to the "Underground Wires" subheading to read about these features.
The Z is for zombie. I'm not a fan of all things zombie, but I do like their take on the game: "Serious examination of a national crisis or natural disaster. Humans and a lack of order are a bigger threat than the undead. Think Hurricane Katrina, Children of Men ... Game is about survival. Scavenging resources, exploring the area, dealing with other survivors, and managing a shelter." They don't mention what would be the two leading examples of this approach: Walking Dead and World War Z, both of which are fine, frightening models to pursue.
Sid Meier's rules for game design are so familiar and wise, they seem like traditional sayings. Most seem intuitive in hindsight, but my favourite still surprises me: "Double it or Cut it by Half," meaning dramatic changes will let you find solutions to your game design problems faster. There's a related principle in game design too, granularity: gains in power should come in bursts, rather than an incremental crawl. Your achievements and choices become more dramatic. They matter.
I sometimes encounter people who seem testy over email. But I work in a field of bunnies compared to DC. Skip the summary article and scroll down to the actual emails.
Mystery Man tells of an atrocious first draft with a great destiny, the story of a young man called Annikin Starkiller. Yes, it's Star Wars: draft one. For real.
A gamemaster suggests a better way to handle role-playing challenges, like bluffs, in pen and paper games. Instead of rolling for the end result ("I convince him to let us see the king"), you roll for stepping stones along the way ("I convince him we met at a royal ball last year").
This feels like the way we handed challenges in our 4E D&D experiment. You didn't roll to survive the wilderness, you described the moment you remembered that certain fungi are edible and the roll determines which way the story goes from there ("...but you forgot they're a purgative in the rainy season").
Oh no, the Flash only has time to save one of his children! Which one will he choose? Comic writer Mark Waid discusses ways to make cliffhangers interesting when your reader knows you're not going to let the victim die.
It's rare for me to need to pass along a business card, but I'd still like to have a small case of luxurious, creamy and understated ones. Of the fifty listed here, I admire Josh Cunningham's lion tamer the most.
Imagine you're the American president in 2009 and you're asked if you believe in American exceptionalism. The traps lurking in this question are obvious, but what is the path through?
Penny Arcade brings the Witchalok to D&D 4E. Also, runner up in today's foolish activities is City of Heroes planned new text-based MMO. Bring your Hayes compatible modem.
In 1803, nineteen year old metalworker John Jewitt was captured by Maquinna, a Vancouver Island Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief, whose men killed all but one of Jewitt's shipmates. Maquinna kept Jewitt for his skills and tried to draw him into their culture. He lived with them for two years before escaping. This article from The Beaver (which only welcomes search engine and library visitors, hence the roundabout link) is rather genteel. You may want to see the Wikipedia link or Jewitt's own book.
To help smooth its growth, the unforgiving online game Darkfall releases copies for sale only once per day at a random time. Would-be players are camping the online store, waiting for the loot to respawn.
Wondering what happened in Iceland? "You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets."
I must admit, I'm baffled as to how a country whose economy has collapsed still seems as expensive as ever to visit. The luxury hotel mentioned in the article is asking USD0/night.
Leonard, who ought to know, offers advice on writing lean fiction. "Number 1: Never open a book with weather." I'm astonished that I haven't posted this article before. It just surfaced like an old artillery shell in my mail archives. His canny publisher also managed to make the 10 rules into a book.
Trenton Kennedy is an undergrad who wants to be a computer game designer, so he wrote a long report about the state of community management in online games, spiced with his suggestions.
You used to hear you couldn't get a job without experience or experience without a job, but web publishing has cut a hole through the paradox by letting you build a reputation and demonstrate your skills and commitment without a job. In fact, I find it hard to imagine breaking into a field now without personal projects like this one under your belt.
We don't even have Trader Joe's here, yet this video makes me miss them. Market on Yates is close. What I like about this fan commercial is that it recognizes that things we love also drive us crazy sometimes. And that's part of the love too.
"More on that from the Law and Order team..." In these times of corporate malfeasance and economic uncertainty, it's gratifying to see a government provide a detailed and transparent account of wrongdoing, the effect on the economy, and the punishment that will fall on the wicked. Unfortunately, the economy is not ours, but is one based on the mining of fictional moons.
I'm not sure how the Globe and Mail ended up being a Canada-wide version of the Queen's Journal, but there always seems to be something about my old school in there.
I was amused to see that the top online story in the National section today was "Woolf named Queen's new principal. The historian is currently the dean of arts at the University of Alberta." I'm sure people from St. John's to Tofino are grabbing their papers and shouting "honey, you won't believe the news!" Maybe if it were an actual wolf.
Scott Slomiany, creator of PocketCiv, is working on new solo game where an adventurer's lifelong arc of quests, exploration and battles is generated out of 20 cards. The key idea is that the player is guided to create the world as he or she plays.
You wouldn't think it mattered, but part of what I love about ENSA is that one of the jobs shifted to the player is picking names. As you play, you need to name locales, creatures and creature types, guided only by a starting letter. Your first kingdom may be known as Avalon, Appleton or Awesomevania, as you see fit. Your enemies may be divided into categories such as albino, undead, tricksy, and those that at a distance resemble flies One insight Scott mentions in passing is that the increasing dangerousness of monsters in the world represents a ticking clock against which your own gains will be measured. Difficulty scaling presents a key design challenge for RPG games--Oblivion bungled it--and seeing rising evil as a clock is a smart way to look at it. This approach works best for short games where losing to the clock doesn't cost you a month's playtime.
Over a year's worth of posts on one modest page. I explored gaming again, looking at the new 4th edition D&D, PocketCiv, MMO sites, Dwarf Fortress and more. I also discovered Freewaregenius and Kate Beaton. Or visit the full archives which reach back to 1999.
Mooselessness is written by Tim Mitchell of British Columbia, Canada.
