malvasia bianca

One of my favorite video game groups is the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, spearheaded by Roger Travis; in particular, I always look forward to the weekly VGHVI gaming nights. (Usually on Thursdays, though other nights are possible as well.) We’d been coordinating our events through a Ning site; unfortunately, Ning has now decided […]

Earlier this summer, we went to see Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West. Which was quite the spectacle, but my first thought after it was over was “after this, I’d better not hear anybody ever complain about video game plots again!” Its plot was threadbare and ridiculous; I’ve certainly played video games with […]

This week’s excitement has been that Disney announced on Tuesday that they are buying Playdom. Which I’m pretty happy about! I wouldn’t have minded if we’d tried to go it alone, but that’s a hard path to follow; and, if we’re going to be acquired by somebody, Disney’s a great choice. I was worried that […]

I had two questions when I started playing the Edgeworth game: how would the role reversal of playing as a prosecutor work, and how would the transition from viewing static screens to walking around environments work? And the answer to both was the same: less of a change than you’d think, but that’s okay. Or […]

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Scary; I’m very glad Miranda is now a competent swimmer. Epic Wimbledon reporting; start at around 4:05pm or so. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Memory hierarchies and algorithm analysis. (Via @mfeathers.) Interesting point of view on hyperlinks and footnotes. (Via @scottros.) For all of you Plato fans out there: (Via here and now.) […]

I had a great time at GDC this year, with one exception: halfway through the conference, my back started really hurting. My laptop isn’t that heavy, but it’s heavy enough, and something about the way it was sitting in my backpack put more strain on my muscles than they wanted. So I decided that, the […]

One of the rules I try to follow on this blog and on Twitter is to not talk about prerelease information for video games. (And, indeed, I don’t even follow prerelease information for video games too closely—why would I want to spend my time thinking about games that don’t yet exist in preference to games […]

9:00am: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, by Allan Collins. He began by talking about incompatibilities between schooling and technology: uniform learning vs. customization, teacher control vs. learner control, teacher as expert vs. diverse sources, standardized assessment vs. specialization, knowledge in head vs. reliance on resources, coverage vs. knowledge explosion, learning by absorption vs. […]

One bit that I forgot to mention in my writeup yesterday: one of the posters was talking about using a pressure sensor on the floor to detect how engaged players were in a game. Seems like a potentially interesting idea, though the analysis was flawed: they changed too many variables at once to be able […]

I’m at the Games, Learning, and Society conference for the rest of the week; here are my notes on today’s events. I started the day by finally getting to meet Roger Travis in person! I’ve been hearing his disembodied voice weekly for ages now at the VGHVI gaming sessions that I feel like I know […]

For its most recent game, the Vintage Game Club returned to its Tim Schafer roots with Psychonauts. Which I was curiously ambivalent about: many people speak highly about it, but I hit 3D platformer fatigue fairly suddenly several years ago, and only one game has really managed to break through that. Still, it’s a genre […]

Watch this illusion: Why can’t we make another Shadow of the Colossus? Super Mario World camera behavior. (Via @danbruno.) An Apple //e really does make a good iPad stand. Jupiter loses a stripe. (Via @stephentotilo.) Ruby Ramen? (Make sure to look at the different product pictures.) (Via @yukihiro_matz.) I’m not exactly happy to learn that […]

I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Experience Points podcast recently; so if you want to hear me ramble, have a listen! I certainly enjoyed the conversation (and the subsequent games of Pandemic), though I wish I’d done a better job of explaining the virtues of market segmentation; many thanks to Jorge […]

MySims Agents is a delightful video game. The presentation is charming; the puzzle solving is lightweight enough to never be frustrating while being engaging enough to keep me happily playing through it; several of the NPCs are amusingly quirky; one of the minigames is surprisingly tricky; the mixture of your main character’s journey plus the […]

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 […]

The Internet Archive has made a million books available for free to those who are blind or otherwise print-impaired. A delightful Bob-omb Battlefield performance. A city of staples. (Via @rands.) I love this attitude towards reuse. (Via @markhneedham.) “Games are too hard, they’re too long, and they provide way too much stuff.” (Via @ncroal.) CSS […]

As I mentioned previously, we’ve relaunched the Vintage Game Club under new game selection rules. And I’m very pleased with how it’s gone so far: after about a week of feeling out what games people might be interested in playing, two games emerged with champions, and in both cases we’ve had enough support that the […]

Daniel Floyd and James Portnow on Video Games and Moral Choices. Ryan from 37 Signals on applying Christopher Alexander to everyday work. Seth Godin’s April Linchpin session. A cat and an iPad. Which I find totally fascinating in a non-cat-youtube-video way. (Via @Laralyn.) I am a biotic god! (Via @truffle.) Amazing clouds. (Via @marick; also, […]

(Short Game disclaimer: There is a trial version of Galcon available in the app store, you’ll have a very good idea of what the game is like after playing it for less than five minutes.) I got curious about Galcon when Randy Smith used it as an example in his GDC talk on “Designing to […]

Plants vs. Zombies is a thoroughly delightful game about which, for better or for worse, I have very little to say. Despite not being a tower defense fan, I enjoyed the main gameplay mode: while I had my favorite tactics, it threw enough changes at me to keep me interested but not overwhelmed. The minigames […]