malvasia bianca

At some point this winter, an urge to reread Madeline L’Engle‘s A Wrinkle in Time came over me. I had read it many times when I was younger, along with the next two volumes in that series, so it’s not surprising that I had that urge; I like to revisit old friends periodically. In general […]

I was planning to mention With the Light in my blog post the other day on juvenile and adolescent games, but I forgot. Actually, though, I’m kind of glad I did, because it’s a good enough work to deserve its own discussion as a positive example of those themes. So I’ll discuss it (or, rather, […]

When Michael reviewed MySims Agents, I knew I had to get it for my daughter for Christmas, and my hopes for the game weren’t misplaced: it looks both fun and charming, she loved it, my wife blazed right through it, and I’ll give it a spin as soon as I’m done with Mass Effect 2. […]

A cross-game comparison of play incentives. (Really via @smgrimes, though Twitter wants me to credit @john_carter.) Journalistic objectivity. Time for me to reread Manufacturing Consent? Massively collaborative mathematics. Game design as government. We The Giants. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and comics. (Via 37 Signals.) Going West. (Via Dubious Quality.) Omohide is going through all […]

A selection from the Pomodoro Technique book that has, for some reason, stuck with me recently: According to the work of Bergson and Minkowski, two profoundly interrelated aspects seem to coexist with reference to time: Becoming. An abstract, dimensional aspect of time, which gives rise to the habit of measuring time (seconds, minutes, hours); the […]

So far, the talk I attended at Agile 2009 that has had the most impact on me was Renzo Borgatti’s talk on the pomodoro technique: I’d heard a bit about the technique before, enough to know that it tells you to break your work up into 25 minute chunks and to try to really focus […]

Michael Feathers on testable Java. Good advice, that is of course relevant far beyond Java. Quite the Venn diagram. (Via @kateri_t.) James Paul Gee on games and teaching. (Via @HackerChick.) Lots to think about here; I hope the VGHVI folks can help me figure it out. A remarkable meandering about games, genres, Japan, and countless […]

Early in the summer I started going through Real World Haskell; unfortunately, conferences and job changes and other programming side projects kept me busy enough that I stopped reading it after a few chapters. That’s calmed down now; and, conveniently, a friend of mine got a copy recently and some others also expressed interest in […]

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 of […]

I mentioned Roger’s Operation KTHMA last time, but it’s actually started now and sounds awesome enough that I’ll mention it again: day 1, day 2, day 3. Our whole household was playing Bunni Game: How We First Met last week. (You should be able to see my world at this link.) Victorian Homes of the […]

One of the GDC sessions I attended this year was a charming panel discussion including, among other people, Steve Meretzky of Infocom fame. Which got me curious what he was up to these days—I don’t generally expect people from that era to still be active in the game industry—and was pleasantly surprised to find out […]

The last chapter of Galison’s Image & Logic is about the relationship between (breaks in) different strands of practice within physics. If you treat the notion of paradigms sufficiently seriously, you’re led to think that theoretical breaks and experimental breaks come hand in hand: the two sides of a paradigm shift are incommensurable, so the […]

I periodically encounter discussions of why people play games (most recently in A Life Well Wasted), and I’ve been getting more and more allergic to such talk. The main reason is that it almost always comes in the form of claims that “we play games to have fun” (with a strong implication that anybody who […]

If you are considering building an experimental apparatus filled with liquid hydrogen, you might want to keep the following incident in mind: Deep within the bubble chamber, the inner beryllium window had shattered along a microscopic imperfection in its surface. Splintering outward, the inner window fragments blasted open the outer beryllium window accompanied by the […]

It’s been ages since I blogged about learning Japanese, so I figured I’d give y’all an update. I finished the textbook I was using last November, which raised the question of what to do next. I have some manga around and even a couple of collections of essays/stories, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up […]

I can’t say I’ve internalized (routinized? inscribed?) Latour’s Laboratory Life yet, but in the mean time I present you with three quotes on routinization, inscription, and facts: To counter these catastrophic possibilities, efforts are made to routinise component actions either through technicians’ training or by automation. Once a string of operations has been routinised, one […]

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 […]

For the second time in the last week, I am regretting that I didn’t blog about a work as soon as I finished it. But the series in question is too good for me to completely ignore an excuse to write about it, and I did take a few notes right after I finished it, […]

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 unexpected […]

More links (and older links) than normal this time: Reader has developed a nasty habit of not showing me all the items with a given tag, so I didn’t realize that I hadn’t posted some of these already. My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s […]