Having said that, I agree that there’s something there about the interpretation of nature. That’s something I found interesting about Flower, trying to piece out what it was saying about nature versus artificial structures: I started out reading it as naive environmentalism, and I no longer believe that to be the case. (And Journey probably fits into that reading somewhere, too.) But that’s a good point that that discussion shouldn’t be seen just in terms of what you’re looking at / blowing over: it’s your interactions, and your readings of those interactions.

I think there is probably an interesting message there, in both games, of the brutality of nature, in a way. For as obvious a message as nature versus the uncaring advance of civilization in Flower, there is probably something to be said about the unflinching nature of, well, nature in both. Animals eat each other. They kill to survive. It is us, the players and humans, who categorize it and classify it. When one creature eats another, even one of its own, is it murder?

There is definitely something to be said about the level of violence in games. Too often conflict is addressed, for characters, as a literal struggle, life or death, fight. It’s easy to understand. Part of the animal part of our brains, no doubt. Still, yes, more games could separate the two. Makes me wonder if approaching the flow state, something we most definitely talked about, is tied to struggle and that, in itself, might be easy to link to fights over life and death — less thinking involved.

I like Return of the Fallen a lot, and it opens up some cool new combos (my favorite: Reclamax + Tablet of Time’s Dawn + Hedron Link Device), though I do agree that it doesn’t expand the vocabulary of the game as much as the Dominion expansions do. I look forward to the next one.

As I attended as a volunteer, I wasn’t able to include myself in any of the case studies, which was a fair trade off I think. I still plan on trying to attend/volunteer at the second Asymconf, and we’ll see how things improve over time.

I’ve audited cases at MIT and Harvard, and there was significant prep required to get the most out of the case model in both places – the case model seems to have several multiplying factors in terms of efficacy: thinking for hours before the case while reading, the guided discussion, debate and analysis during the case itself, and the wrap-up discussions in the corridors or over coffee or dinner in the days and weeks afterwards. This is in addition to the specific learning-style aspects to the method.

The method (for good or ill) aligns most participants – the same background information, data and paradigms can lead to very productive discussion and learning, but also to a kind of group-think or an inability to rock the boat because no-one identifies that we’re in a boat at all :-)

Perhaps Horace was trying to avoid the groupthink problem?

I guess I missed that intensity and duration of thought quite a bit.

This is a super interesting area that I stumbled upon about two years ago. It goes really deep and things get quite strange (Impro will give you a hint about that).

Let me know if you’re interested in talking more offline as it sounds like our paths may be similar.

You Just Don’t Understand:
Women and Men in Conversation

That’s Not What I Meant!:
How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

She’s not an economist, she’s a linguist, and she talks about her two axis (closeness and hierarchy) in both books.

She’s also somewhat politically correct, which is unfortunate because it blunts the quality of her analysis. If you are reading Tannen, you should also read the “Status” chapter in “Impro” by Johnstone. His core insight — that *every* interaction is a status exchange — is very interesting.

I honestly don’t know what it would take for my opinion to change about opinion, but my guess is that it would be a combination of a few things: seeing them openly make choices that supported “Don’t Be Evil” while hurting their business in tangible ways (but perhaps helping them in intangible ways); showing some sign that they’re actively on the side of users at the expense of advertisers; and/or doing some sort of impressive design that got me interested enough in the products that I cared less about the other stuff. It’s too late for it now, but if Android had turned into a product that used open source to help users keep their phones up to date (instead of being locked into a year-old version of the operating system) running on open spectrum (which Google was once fighting for) with a design that was clearly bringing something new to the space (as Microsoft seems to be trying to do, though admittedly I’m neither an Android nor a Windows Phone user, so I could be getting that wrong), I imagine that would make a difference.

I don’t claim to have a logical explanation as to why Apple’s patent behavior doesn’t bother me more than it does; certainly it’s the biggest way in which I wish Apple would behave differently, and something that me of twenty years ago would be disappointed in my feelings now. That last bit may be part of the answer – that I’ve had twenty years to come to terms with that aspect of Apple’s behavior, while my active disappointment with Google is relatively new, so I’m still figuring out what it means. But the other reason is that I feel I have so much to learn from Apple design-wise and business-wise, and I don’t currently feel that way about Google; that turns out to make a pretty big difference.

I’ve been trying to sort out my feelings about Apple for a while – pretty sure you saw http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2011/12/an-apple-focused-personal-history-of-computing/ but http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2010/04/habitable-software/ is also (at least in my mind in retrospect) all about that tension, and there are anti-Apple posts further back in the archives: http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2007/09/mad-at-apple/ and http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2006/03/apple-is-bad/