malvasia bianca

Another World’s opening cut scene shows an experiment gone awry, with my character being transported to another world, where I got dropped into a pool of water.
At which point I died.
On my next attempt, I moved out of the water; after a bit of trial and error, I killed the slugs on the next screen, [...]

One of the surprises I encountered when reading The Nature of Order was that Christopher Alexander designed a bench at Fort Mason. (He talks about the process of its construction in the third volume of Nature of Order.) So when Agile Open California returned to Fort Mason last year, I made a point [...]

So, now I’ve written about all the GDC panels I attended; for reference, the links are:

Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
Friday, part one and part two.
Saturday, part one and part two.

So, that’s the trees; what about the forest? Looking back at it, I see two themes coming out of the conference for me.
Know Your Audience
The first is that you [...]

On the Saturday of GDC this year, I went to two talks on Mass Effect 2 and two talks on other subjects; since I have a fair amount to say on both pairs of talks, I’ll split them up into two posts.
9:00 am: Where Did My Inventory Go? Refining Gameplay in Mass Effect 2, by [...]

There was a time towards the end of 2008 when it seemed like everybody in my twitter feed was talking about Yakuza 2. It was apparently a Shenmue-style action RPG (also published by Sega), but (as Steve Gaynor so eloquently outlined in the 2008 holiday confab) filled with delightfully quirky side missions, missions that [...]

I want to talk about a couple of talks I attended at Agile 2009. Both relate to experts, expertise, and how one develops the latter to become the former.
The first was given by Jon Dahl, on “Aristotle and the Art of Software Development”. You can see video and slides of an earlier delivery [...]

The third volume of The Nature of Order, while very good, didn’t have the same impact on me as the earlier volumes did. Having said that, this bit from the conclusion is giving me something to think about:
And in all this that I observe, when I talk to politicians, to townspeople, to developers, when [...]

The fifth level of Flower is the most problematic by far. At the end of the fourth level, you get a pretty strong indication that matters have taken a turn for the worse, with some sort of black energy running along power cables that have glowing red lights; even so, I was completely unprepared [...]

At 4:00pm on the friday of GDC, I attended The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. I went because I loved Mass Effect and because I’m always happy to see the word “iterative” used, but the talk turned out to be an excellent final experience from the conference for a completely [...]

I claimed that my last post was going to be my last Christopher Alexander post for a while, but I lied. I spend some time today reading Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, the first part of which talks about Alexander’s work (up through the carpets book, which isn’t discussed nearly enough; Gabriel’s book dates [...]

One more Christopher Alexander Nature of Order post, and then I’ll take a break. This is a counterpart to my earlier post about living code (I even repeat some of the examples): this time, I’m focusing on the agile processes that might produce that code. Again, thanks to the Agile Open California participants [...]

Today’s Nature of Order experiment: see what the characteristics of living structures might look like when applied to software. Many thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped me think through this; I’ll have a later blog post that talks about agile and living processes.
Levels of Scale
This is certainly present in the hierarchical [...]

I trust you are all aware of The Big Picture? I thought this one was particularly beautiful. And unrepresentative, in that the pictures are all taken from a single source, the Earth from Above exhibit.
My favorite video game business analyst giving an exegesis of a recent Nintendo interview.
The backlog as a map. [...]

We’ve finished the VGC playthrough of Deus Ex; what did I learn from the experience?
Well, one thing that I learned is that a lot of people have a lot more to say about the narrative and world of the game than I do. Which made reading through the discussion a lot of fun! [...]

When I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus, I was impressed by it, but no more than by several other games from around the same time.
Then at some point, perhaps a year and a half later, I was browsing the web and came across a picture of the game. And I gasped, I shuddered. [...]

Agile Open California 2008 was yesterday and today; like last year, it was a wonderful experience. I’m a bit too tired to post much now, but the bare-bones report:
It started off a bit slow: in a corporate building (which was perhaps more functionally laid out than last year’s, but sorely lacking in sailboats and [...]

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it.
But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) [...]

I’ve been on a bit of a Christopher Alexander kick for the last couple of years. At first, I started reading his most famous books, but those were good enough to leave me curious about what else he’d written. Not all of which is great, but enough is to keep me going.
Still, it’s [...]

I’m in the middle of reading A New Theory of Urban Design. Not one of Alexander’s best (though it’s interesting enough); it’s hurt by problem that, as he comments, part of the theory that he’s discussing “remains unpublished. It will appear in a later volume of this series, “The Nature of Order”. [...]