Brilliant.

"…what Civilization provides is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, which is three times more than what you probably started with. If you play the game in particularly interesting way, then you can be rewarded with a delightful, surprising experience that you can’t help but weave into a story, inventing characters and lovers and intrigues all round. This story might tug at you so insistently that you begin to jot down notes and timelines, writing diary entries and newspaper reports of battles. Eventually, you might join all those pieces up, rewrite them, throw it all away, and rewrite it again – and then you might call yourself a storyteller." And this is one of the kinds of storytelling that games are best at: collaborative tales weaved between ruleset and player, between man and machine.

Wow. One to return to: a super-comprehensive look at Pac-Man, including its AI routines and collision detection.

"It now seems morally important to me to do without minor characters in a story. Any character who appears, however briefly, deserves to have his or her life story fully respected and told."

Nice post on future interfaces, but primarily bookmarked because I can *never* find that GITS:SAC still when I need it, and it's *brilliant*.

This looks like it could be great – very Karateka-esque take on duelling. Bonus points for a "throw sword" move and the slide; it's all just-Douglas-Fairbanks enough.

"…how does Charland describe his own work? He says, "Its like 5th grade science mixed with sculpture. Its about being curious and playful. There is still a lot to wonder about."" Lovely, lovely long-exposure work, proving again that in very long exposures, you can wander around and not really show up. My favourites are the most elegant – the final image, of a candle burning down over an hour, is stunning.

"RACER is an analogue recreation of a coputer racing game in the style of the classic WipeOut. It consists of a modified vintage arcade machine, a RC model car with a wireless camera, an a self-constructed racetrack/game level made entirely from cardboard." Brilliant.

"It fools the government into thinking Local Development Agencies (LDAs) attract young creative people in “the regions”, and it fails to support the local young talent who probably prefer hanging out with their laptop in a place with perfect coffee. After all that’s how the Royal Society was created… I’ve been up and down the UK and those innovation spaces have the worst coffee in the universe. Just saying."

"…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography." Finally, found the Borges quotation about a map the size of the world.