“This feels like the climax of Act 1 of the internet.”
– Torquill, Neogaf forums.
We may not have found the Citizen Kane of games yet, but this is definitely their Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Limbo of The Lost is a point and click adventure game developed by Majestic, an outfit of three English geezers. Definitely [...]

I’ve been sceptical of CDs and optical media since I last moved house and had to carry them. I’m purging my possessions of extraneous stuff at the moment, and last night ripped and tagged all of my remaining CDs. The pile came out to about 4 gigabytes of MP3s, which is the size of the [...]

While 3D printing will remain the territory of geeks and tinkerers for quite a while to come, an impressive step was achieved with the RepRap last week: It can now print its own components. Not quite full self replication, in the sense of a second, fully assembled printer appearing end on out of a first, [...]

After the jump there’s a written version of the keynote talk I gave at Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer on Saturday the 7th of June. You can find slides to go with it here, an embedded version with image credits here, links to most of the things I’m talking about here, the conference [...]

Here are the slides for the Game Culture Talk I did last Saturday at Under The Mask:

| View | Upload your own

These are also mirrored with transcript on the Pixel-Lab site.
If the embed doesn’t work for you, here’s a link to the slide page.
Photo credits after the jump. Most images were used under creative [...]

Watching a friend play PES2007 on his PS3 last night, suddenly a big, garish PLAY.COM banner showed up in one of the menus:
“Look at that! It’s advertising in a game. Oh. That’s annoying. Games were one of the last places I could go to get away from it.”
He’s also annoyed that the game required him [...]

Bruce Sterling is pretty funny in this video on hostile objects.
I mean if Google designed payphones it’d be like…
Who do you need to talk to? Would you like me to help you find his address? We can look him up in any of thirty different ways. Here’s his picture.
He goes on to describe DRM [...]

Raph Koster is on fire in this interview on Gamasutra today:
I think we have to look at the current game industry as being a subset of big media, and big media is running into some issues lately. It’s not that they’re going to go away, and it’s not that they’re going to have less power. [...]

An incidental comment from a talk by Adam Russell on AI:
Technological change is quick. Cultural change is glacial.
Nothing promotes cultural change like positive values, and the higher the value to people, the bigger the wave a zeitgeist can ride. A multitude of peers are the best marketing and distribution arm possible, near optimally communicating things [...]

Yesterday, Digg learned about fighting culture. Little over a month ago, so did the Hungarian government.
Culture isn’t quite an unstoppable force, nor an immovable object, but it’s a damn sight more resistant than most things.
Everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen the same patterns of wear: Brown lines in the grass, kinks in the ironwork, footprints on [...]

It’s nice to see more people catching on. Burton may be late to the party, but still faster than the networks.
Path of least resistance epitomises it; people minimise energy expenditure in the course of catering to their motives (This isn’t Homo Economicus, because motives aren’t always rational).
Media can harmonise with culture or will end up [...]

Another gem via John Robb. It’s another part of the amazing story that I’m watching emerge this year: The black economies that have served as the scapegoats and bogeymen of ailing institutions are in fact suffering exactly the same shocks.
Fatal intersection: The arc of a crime crew:
Big gangs have a shadow of their former influence [...]

BarCamp London 2 was amazing. Met loads of interesting and fantastic people. Marvelled at the incredibly techy venue (One meeting room had a smart glass sound proof wall with a pure SF, switch operated sliding door :) ).
Played werewolf, which is one of the simplest and most compelling games I’ve ever played. A perfect mix [...]

John Robb today on goods becoming information:
As the percentage of the value of more and more products/services become information, these products are vulnerable to open source competition. This gets even more interesting as we move towards highly decentralized fabrication (which is moving quickly), which turns even the most mundane physical object into information + feedstock [...]

I cannot believe how… sensible some things seem to be this year.
Today: Microsoft voice support of OpenID, and Steve Jobs begins to make some quite forceful anti-DRM noises.

Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

It’s been pointed out in many [...]