malvasia bianca

Some evidence for anybody curious how well being good at Rock Band drums transfers to real drums. The neuroscience of illusion; I’ll embed one of the videos so you can see the kind of thing they’re discussing. (Via Kelley Eskridge.) A pleasant network logic puzzle game. (Via User Friendly, which makes it essentially impossible to […]

One of the most interesting of the talks I attended at this year’s GDC was Margeret Robertson’ talk Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money: Why Your Game Doesn’t Need a Story to be a Hit. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any notes while listening to it, so my summary at the time was exceedingly sparse. […]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been finding enough unusual projects imposing on my time that I think I’m going to have to shuffle my priorities, albeit temporarily. I’ve been wanting to do more programming at home than normal recently: aside from improving the memory project, I want to spend a bit of time getting […]

I normally stay away from online video game play, both because of a lack of time and because of the bad things I’ve heard about strangers’ behavior on Xbox Live. For the last six months, though, I’ve been meeting up every Thursday thursday to play games with people from the Video Games and Human Values […]

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce: the power of choices, of market segmentation. Two on folded paper: pictures by Simon Schubert (via @KathySierra) and a TED talk by Robert Lang on the origami that modern math and computers allow us to produce. An abandoned island city. (Via @japanesepod101.) Or, if you want a whole blog about […]

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 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 for […]

The Vintage Game Club chose Chrono Trigger as its fifth game. I never owned a SNES, so I missed the game its first time around; I did play through most of the PS1 port of the game, but found it a bit of a slog. Which, I’d gathered, had a lot more to do with […]

One of my goals in going to GDC was to get a feel for what the industry is like on the inside. I think I succeeded in that, to some extent; what I wasn’t expecting, however, what that I’d learn so much about what I like about my current job, and about things to keep […]

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here. A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark. Everything you’d […]

It took me a while to get around to playing Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. I’d enjoyed the earlier games in the series, but I’ve played through enough video game series (and, for that matter, read enough book series) to know how these things go: the initial spark that makes the first game special gets more […]

I apologize for the lack of posts over the last week; I hope to remedy that over the coming evenings. In the meantime, I did have the pleasure of being one of the guests on the most recent Brainy Gamer podcast, a collection of confab segments on our recent GDC experiences; I thoroughly enjoyed the […]

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 […]

My notes from the talks that I went to on Friday at GDC: 9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight control, […]

A quite good day today; three of the five sessions that I attended were extremely interesting. My notes: 9:00am: GDC Microtalks. I was wondering if I should go to it—my experiences yesterday didn’t leave me entirely sold on the value of panels—but I figured that, if I got one interesting thing out of it, I […]

Notes from today: 9:00am: Iwata’s Keynote. The part I enjoyed the most was his discussion of Miyamoto’s development style. I wish I’d taken better notes on one slide in particular; a few things he talked about: No design documents. Instead, they depend on personal communication among small teams. They use very focused prototypes. These are […]

I’m trying to firm up my GDC schedule. (Though, as you will see below, I’m failing miserably in that regard.) For people reading this blog who are going to be there: this is what I look like, please say hi! The only meal I have scheduled right now is dinner on Thursday, if anybody wants […]

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 […]

I’d been thinking of giving Miranda a copy of Mario Kart Wii for Christmas, but Amazon was sold out of copies on the day that I was ordering presents. Rather than hunt for that game at other stores, I went with my second choice, Boom Blox, which turned out to be a quite pleasant alternative. […]

The Vintage Game Club chose Beyond Good & Evil as its fourth game. I played the game when it first came out; I enjoyed it, but it didn’t make a big impact on me, and I mentally pigeonholed it as a short Zelda clone. Still, I was happy enough to have an excuse to replay […]