Category: random thoughts
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Leikkiä, Pelata, Soittaa = Play
Spurred on by Kassen in the last post, and as someone who happens to be learning Finnish, one of the things (originally pointed out to me by Teemu Leinonen) that has struck me is the superfluity of words used to describe “play” – which has always seemed one of these dangerously obscure words in english,…
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On game design
It’s recently become apparent that as I am doing a lot of game design, and seem to have loads of opinions on the subject, that I should acknowledge the fact, at least to myself – that my interests in games go further than programming. I’m also very wary of ‘design practices’ as it’s been my…
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On Flash, software art and freedom
With the current state of html5 not really being where I want it to be, I feel I need to air my dirty laundry on the use of Flash. I want to make browser based applications in order to increase accessibility – with the understanding that I may need to make concessions to freedom to…
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Scheme Bricks for Graphics
Scheme bricks was originally designed as a visual programming interface for functional reactive programming using frisbee – an experimental fluxus based game engine built on top of PLT’s FrTime language. I’ve ended up spending the last 18 months beta testing it in livecoding performances with slub using fluxa, culminating in the workshop last week. This…
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Hampstead
Hampstead is a text adventure game written in 1984, which conveys a certain attitude I find refreshing 26 years later. It’s a document of London life, and rich in satire of the social customs of the time. It even exists as a museum piece – not sure how many computer games can lay claim to…
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Disembodied
I’ve been attending bits of the FoAM update meeting remotely, it’s a strange disembodied experience, but better from the carbon viewpoint. Here’s a screenshot of the planning of next years events:
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The hidden history of the Monopoly board game
As I’ve been researching the ideas of Jane McGonigal lately, I was interested to find out the real history of the Monopoly board game from Dmytri Kleiner at the weekend. From wikipedia, thanks to the research of Ralph Anspach: In 1903, the Georgist Lizzie Magie applied for a patent on a game called The Landlord’s…
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post chmod +x art
Back from Groningen, and my mind is full of all sorts of crazy ideas after GOTO10’s mini festival. Although mini in size, the quality of this event was very high. The day after arriving, Gabor and I did our best to introduce our workshop participants to livecoding and fluxus, from the basics of scheme to…
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Post industrial rehab
So over a year on from leaving the world of computer games megacorporations and big budget movie special effects, it’s maybe time to be a bit less terse than usual and compare and contrast against life in the shadowy world of arts, academia and free software. There are fairly obvious benefits of leaving the 9.00-6.30…