Now that it’s been properly launched, I can finally take the lid off something we worked on over the summer: Fantasy Health Minister.

As part of a sponsored project on health, we built this; an online strategy game revolving around health policy. It was fun to work on, and certainly a change from our usual work. A real team effort, too; I only really contributed the design/layout, some help with refining it, the odd bit of copy, and lots of digital inking (translation: trying to make Photoshop work like felt-tip pens). The lovely artwork is by the very talented David Simonds, our editorial cartoonist over at the Statesman.

Anyhow, just a heads up. Do check it out!

Another piece of writing in the New Statesman; this time, a review of the Le Placard international headphones festival.

About 40 people are sprawled on the floor, or on an array of battered chairs and sofas. Along one wall is a row of desks and tables, behind which sit a handful of unshaven young men, backlit by Anglepoise lamps, fiddling with laptops, mixing desks and a wind-up shortwave radio. Naturally, I can’t hear any of it. So I sit down at a table and try to plug in my headphones.

Read the whole article.

So at the weekend I picked up Far Cry: Instincts. It’s a very good game – pushes the Xbox graphically in ways you couldn’t dream (trumping even Riddick) and has a great fun set of multiplayer modes.

What’s really interesting, though, is that it has an excellent mapmaker. Far from letting you just move around tiles, it lets you mould terrain, build structures, and plan complex maps – and then play them online with your friends. It’s been really well designed – the controls are superbly mapped to the Xbox pad. It still takes a while to make a map, but it’s not tricky to make some quite complex ones.

Anyhow. When you’ve made a map, you “publish” it – this doesn’t upload it anywhere, it just seems to verify it with your online name (Gamertag, in Xbox parlance). And then you can host games with your friends, with your map. They will, of course, have to download it from you, but that takes a few minutes, and then everyone can play.

Here’s where it gets clever. When they come to host a game, they’ll find your map – which they just downloaded – is on their list of maps. So they can host a game with the map you created. And if it’s a good map, they may well do.

And so then everyone they play with gets to use your map. And so, if you’ve created something really good, it’s going to spread virally very quickly; players will say “this map is good, man, you should play it”. At its logical conclusion, as many people will have your map as the ones the game comes with, and then you’ve entered canon. Wheras PC games (which are usually very moddable) have a distribution network of the Internet, Xbox games don’t have the same freedom for downloading new content. So Ubisoft should be applauded for letting the players become one big viral network, in which they ‘catch’ maps off one another.

The game’s online implementation has the customary Ubisoft online flaws, but in terms of how easy it is to make brand new content – and, more to the point, how easy it is for that content to propagate based purely on merit – it’s really something special. I can’t wait to see what happens when the map-makers get really good…

So it was my birthday recently, and I decided I needed a new laptop bag as my current one (a lovely Muji number) is fraying a bit, and I’m disturbed that one day it might just fray into nothingness… with my laptop still inside. I hate anything that looks remotely like a laptop bag – hence the Muji number – and decided this time, I’d look for a Crumpler.

Now, Crumplers are expensive bags, especially if you want one of a suitable size. Even though I only have a 12″ Powerbook, I also have a habit of carrying around adapters, a mouse, notebooks, odds and ends, and maybe a large book – and that all fills out. I eventually settled on a Crippy Duck (now renamed to The Luncheon). Nice size, portrait-orientation.

£90 of your English pounds (if you head to Micro Anvika). Ouch.

Whoops. Unexpected hiatus in posting, there; first the long posts slipped, then the link-posts, and by the time I wasn’t even posting stuff into delicious it was getting desperate. I forgot how busy September gets. Far too many people I know are born in said month, and coupled with new terms (school, university, parliamentary) and a return to longer issues, everything ground to a halt round here. IKB – the temporary theme, an attempt at something more generic – has also kind-of ground to a halt. But it’s been a fertile testing ground and something approaching a “proper design” should return soon to these pages. I’ve also been more development work, in both PHP and Rails. The latter’s still proving enjoyable; I’m hitting the tricky problems now, which is good, because I used to be getting stuck on the basic problems.

Keep your eyes peeled; there’s bound to be good stuff coming soon.