malvasia bianca

John Fairbairn and Mark Hall have been doing a series of books on single go games or a small series of games, and they’re really good: a great combination of historical context paired with detailed commentary on the moves of the games themselves. The one I just finished reading was The Go Consultants, devoted to […]

My current (mild) bugaboo at work: agreeing on plans. “Bugaboo” is really too strong a term, but it’s something that I’ve been probing a bit. Like a lot of my coworkers, I’m not a big fan of hierarchy (actually, I actively dislike hierarchy, though I won’t speak for others in that regard); also, like a […]

I’ve had a few experiences recently (e.g. at one of the GDC talks that I attended) where somebody uses the word “agile” to describe a process that doesn’t sound particularly agile to me. So I figured I’d take some time to try to understand that difference, and in particular to think about what attributes will […]

Thursday’s talks were rather meh, but Friday started off with my favorite of this year’s postmortems and just got better from there; a fabulous way to end the conference. My notes: 10:00am: George Fan, How I Got My Mom to Play through Plants vs. Zombies The tutorial was the most important factor in helping his […]

I wasn’t planning to go to this talk until I heard his pitch in the Flash Forward session; something in that pitch reminded me of a Gerald Weinberg / AYE approach to personal interaction, so I went. And I’m very glad I went: certainly my favorite talk of this GDC, but perhaps one of my […]

Not a great day for me. The morning was postmorterms for games I’ve never played; I basically enjoyed the postmorterms, but in retrospect I should have tried something else. And both afternoon talks were actively disappointing. Or at least not a great day for me in terms of talks: I had a lovely lunch with […]

9:00am: Flash Forward Most of the speakers were given 45 seconds to pitch their talk; it was well run, people did a good job. I learned a little bit more about why the schedule seems a bit more meh than normal to me this year: it’s because the schedule turns out to be full of […]

My favorite talk on the first day of GDC was Margaret Robertson’s The Gamification of Death: How the Hardest Game Design Challenge Ever Demonstrates the Limits of Gaming, so I figured I’d break out my notes on that to a separate blog entry. Her takeaways from the project that this session was about: Your work […]

The startup that I’ve been working at for the last year, Sumo Logic, has now launched its product! Our product is a service for gathering, searching, and analyzing logs: if you have software that’s generating log files, you point our collector at those files and it will upload them to our service, at which point […]