Things never get boring here at Intelligent Artifice. OK, actually, sometimes they do, but not right now is what I guess I want to say. Mere days after announcing the use of Delicious to automatically generate blog posts, I’ve added another way for me to more easily get content to you: Twitter.
Twitter, or rather what is cool about Twitter, is notoriously difficult to explain, so I am not even going to try except to say that it’s a micro-blog where each message is 140 characters or less.
I’ve created a public Twitter account to accompany this blog. I foolishly chose a long and obscure name for my blog, but I have grown older and wiser since then, so I chose a shorter, clearer name for Twitter: JurieOnGames. You can see my tweets in a box on the right on the main page, unless you’re reading this in a feed reader of course. (You can subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter stream.)
Overlap between the blog and the tweets should be minimal, and I promise I won’t announce every blog post here in a tweet… only some, and using hand-crafted messages. Nothing but the best for my readers.
(Some of you may know I have a second, protected Twitter account. That one is for people I know personally, and I use it to rant about life in Vienna and report on headaches etc. So you’re not missing much.)
I remembered just in time that 18 years ago today, I started my first day of professional and paid work in the games industry, at the long-defunct, quasi-legendary German company Thalion software. I can’t recall if I’ve blogged about this before. Every year it grows slightly less meaningless, until 2011 when I hit 20 years I guess.
Also, 5 months ago today I met my lovely girlfriend, a far more significant milestone.
My good friend Mark Barrett sent me a link to an article about Pathologic, a game from 2004 that I had never heard of before. Mark seemed excited about the game, and, after I read more about it, so am I.
The article is Butchering Pathologic, by Quintin Smith, over on the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun. It starts with:
I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played.
Intrigued yet? Go read the article. It’s in three parts, so it may take a while.
Continue Reading »
These are my links for January 12th from 04:49 to 11:55:
- Creepy electropop video – 'If I Had A Heart', by The Knife. Very nice music video.
- Genre, give up your secrets! – James Henry on why a lot of genre TV in the UK is crap. Nice if you're interested in writing genre or wondering why stuff, e.g. games, is crap.
- Why is joining the WGA mandatory? – John August briefly explains aspects of the WGA and Hollywood's guild system. I will take this up again in a planned post on credits in the games industry.
- Best of Bootie 2008 CD – The 2008 Best of Bootie compilation is here! There are some great mashups on here. Check out the previous years too – you'll wonder why Careless Whisper and Wanted Dead Or Alive were ever separate tracks.
- A late 2007 article on Harold Pinter from The New Yorker – I like reading about how other artists in other media have changed what can be done in their medium.
These are my links for January 9th from 10:17 to 10:51:
- Kodu – Microsoft Research – A visual game development system for the Xbox 360, developed by Microsoft Research. Could be interesting – not so much for pro game development, but for the ideas.
- Fullbright: MOTY 08 – Gaming Moments of the Year 2008. 2longdidn'tread, but I like the idea.
- LEGO Universe : Home – I can't be bothered to take a deeper look right now, but I admit to being somewhat intrigued by the Lego MMO.
- Toshiba unveils future Regza LCD upgrades, and the future of their HDTVs: Cell TV – Boing Boing Gadgets – Convergence, that bugaboo of our supposedly fast-moving times, is really like an extremely-slow-motion car pile-up. Here we enter the final stretch and see Samsung heading straight towards Apple, Microsoft, console manufacturers, and open source media center developers. The real computers will win, but Samsung, among others, will be making money until that happens. And perhaps in the end they will even be making computers. Meanwhile, I wouldn't mind one of those new Regzas.
- Click Nothing: Critical Condition – More good writing about videogames linked from this post by Clint Hocking.
- Mapping the Brainysphere: 29 blogs switched-on gamers should read « Subject Navigator – There's way too much good writing about videogames these days (via Clint Hocking).
As you can see from the previous post, I have started using a new way to blog interesting things. Whatever I save and tag in Delicious automatically gets posted here (using Postalicious, a nice WordPress plugin). Keen IA readers may remember I did something similar back in late 2006, but I was not happy with the formatting and the control. Hence ‘new-ish’.
I often come across links that I find interesting, but I cannot find the time or inspiration to write an entire blog post about it. So instead, I often do not post it at all. This method should help solve that and increase my posting frequency.
I will be tweaking the parameters a bit over the next few days. Let me know what you think!
These are my links for January 9th from 09:14 to 09:21:
Miss Berzerk Raccoon and I have been playing Lego Star Wars 2 recently, as you may already know if you read her blog. I own Lego Star Wars 1 and 2 and have finished all of the levels (a rare thing for me). I also recently bought Lego Batman after playing the Xbox Live demo, but haven’t had a chance to play that yet due to the lack of a functioning Wii. So you could say I’m a fan of Travellers’ Tales’ (TT) Lego games. (I didn’t get Lego Indiana Jones because I know a level designer at TT and he claimed the Batman game was better.)
Here are some observations on Lego Star Wars now that I’m playing through again in coop mode:
Continue Reading »
I just remembered that this blog is now 6 years old. Or rather, on December 19th 2008 the blog was 6 years old. But hey, who’s keeping count. Well, me, OK, I will grant you that. Anyway. 6 years. Wow. Pretty… meaningless. Apart from being a long time. Kind of. Not compared to the age of the universe, true. But that first post seems like an awful long time ago.
Whether you’ve just discovered this site or whether you’ve been reading from the start (and I think I know all five of you): thanks for reading. Which posts do you like? Which posts do you not like?
Oh, and happy new year.
The 90-9-1 Principle is an often discussed concept that has been used in countless conversations about online communities and social strategy. Until now, there hasn’t been a single collection of description and support for the principle, making it hard to share a single links with clients, colleagues, and friends who haven’t heard of 90-9-1. This site works to solve that problem!
Funnily enough, I have occasionally wanted to refer to the 90-9-1 principle, but without just hand-wavingly putting in a sourceless reference, so I had to scour the web for a good bit of text explaining things. So this site looks like it may solve an actual problem for me. This site even lists some sources, making it at least appear to be a valid and reputable theory.
Update: The web page I used until discovering this dedicated site is this one by Bradley Horowitz from February 2006. It is the earliest mention of the idea I was able to find.
