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Post-Eyjafjallajökull microfiction.
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"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).
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Quick tutorial in add_meta_box – the way to add custom fields to WordPress forms.
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More clever stuff with dedicated post types in WP3; notably, adding custom fields to custom post-type forms.
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"If there is a bigger Splinter Cell fan than myself, I haven't yet met them; but in their zeal to promote the newest iteration, Ubisoft has caused Sam Fisher to tweet. And I don't mean they've made him chirp, which would be preferable. They've given him a Twitter account where he tweets in a supremely earnest way about how tormented his shit is.<br />
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*No.*" Oh dear. -
"A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving." Oh boy. That's quite a thing (and: quite a sentence!)
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"I've been using Copy with Style command, which I took from this blog post. It copies text selection as RTF so when the code is pasted into Keynote, it looks exactly the same as it looked in TextMate, including font style, size and colors. Code can be then modified in Keynote, while the style is preserved." Useful!
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"…let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great – Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.
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"The game insists that I focus, even for mundane activities like carrying groceries, on carefully following directions delivered to me visually on-screen. The simple act of carrying groceries is subsumed by the mechanical procedure of executing a series of prompts _for no apparent reason_. This, for me, is the primary disconnect in Heavy Rain. My mechanical game-directed actions don't amplify or add meaning to the in-game behaviors they execute. They don't pull me in; they keep me out. " Hmn. I've been thinking about something similar recently. Time to fire up the blogpostmatron…
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Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever – and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.
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"…for reasons that baffle me, my TV can only receive the four terrestrial channels, plus a grainy feed from the building’s security cameras. Easy choice."
Eurogamer in 2009: Score Analysis
18 January 2010
I really liked last.fm’s end-of-year charts. I also really liked this analysis of Pitchfork’s scoring in 2009, just for the statistical fun. And then I thought about my favourite score-oriented website, and wondered why no-one’s done this for Eurogamer yet. I’d be the first to argue that scores in reviews aren’t that important – but everybody loves arguing about them in comments threads, and besides, they make for interesting statistics. What I’d really like would be something like the Pitchfork analysis, but looking a bit more like the last.fm site.
And then after two days I just decided to build it myself.
It’s relatively straightforward: a small app to explore a year’s worth of review scores, built around the pillars of reviews, writers, and scores. Most blue things are clickable; writers have pages that show their reviews, as well as their own averages, deviance from EG’s norm, and the scale of their contribution to the overall average. That latter figure is something I call influence; it took a long while to get to, and I write about it more here. Here’s Simon Parkin’s page as a good example of a writer’s page.
Reviews also have pages – here’s one for Modern Warfare 2, which show how the review compares to the site’s average, the writer’s average, and also to Metacritic. And, of course, you can see just how many games scored 7 – or any other score – if you want. Basically: have a click around.
I started two weeks ago, and guess I stopped committing in the middle of last week, but towards the endit was just front-end tweaks. It’s not been a big project at all – about an hour or two’s work a day on average, in evenings, and lunch-hours, over about ten days.
It’s not a very advanced project, and touches lots of bases I’m working with a lot right now – data analysis, visualisation, scraping. That said, it’s got some interesting stuff under the hood. I’m using Typekit for the attractive type, and it’s been a pleasure to work with. The graphs are a combination of the Google Charts API and gRaphaël, which I’ve had reasonable results from recently. gRaphaël’s strength are beautiful visualisations, rather than ultra-accurate charting, so the pair of tools are used for their strengths. Finally, it’s all deployed on Heroku, which has been a joy as ever; cloud deployment of databased apps, on dynamic hosting, as simple as pushing to a new git repo. And, for the scale of the Eurogamer tool, totally free.
So there you go. A little exploration of some numbers, which bring some interesting figures to light, and was also fun to build. It only felt right to share it. As the site says, scores aren’t everything – you should read reviews too, folks – but when you’ve got numerical data, it seems a shame not to do anything with it.
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"It still amazes me that with the Practical Application of Codes and Pictures, 1145 lines of gobbledegook and 554KB of compressed images can be turned into this." Making stuff is awesome.
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"Since I’m an OS X user, I decided to make the whole thing work on my system – Leopard 10.5.6 at the time of this writing. Here are the notes, mostly for my reference and because it might be also useful to others:" God yes; setting up cairo on my Mac proved a nightmare last year.
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I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.
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That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.
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"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.
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Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.
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"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.
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"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.
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"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.
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"Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all – it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.
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'“The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”' Masses of good things in here – think I've quoted it elsewhere – but it's not on my Delicious, so in it goes.
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"DFC's main takeaway from the study is that the flexible, quickly-adaptable nature of online distribution services like Steam allow for developers to use a broad variety of promotions and incentives to keep their game communities fresh; individual promotions like the Survival Pack had a positive effect on both platforms, but it was the one-two punch of that DLC plus the followup free weekend through Steam that had the most meaningful impact on the game at any point on either platform."
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Art of the Title interview the chaps behind Wall-E's end credits, which knocked me out the first time I saw them, and still give me the loveliest buzz to this day.
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Generates a tiny file to do the most basic things, from the looks of it.
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Ooh, this looks like a very interesting write-up of a thoughtful SXSW session. Marked as something I need to follow up on.
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"You don’t need to be able to lose for a game to be enjoyable or challenging. You just need to be able to fail." Some good notes on the purpose of failure in games, and how to sensibly work failure as a mechanic into games without irritating players.
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The Klein Four are "the premiere a capella group of the world of higher mathematics". Judging from this video: yes, so they are.