games
There is no app that replicates a deck of cards
Disorientation
Learning to walk through walls
The things that you’re meant to do
List of games that Buddha would not play
Right-Angle Doodling Machine
Follow the fun
An Article by Dave RupertAnother great dissertation from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit: The Games that Designed Themselves. It’s the radical idea that designers should ignore their preconceived notions and look to the game itself to find out where the development should lead. How does something design itself? Well… the answer is: Prototypes.
A lot of great indie game masterpieces are the result of experimentation and early gameplay demos that changed the course of game’s development. As Brown points out, there’s a whole history of groundbreaking games that were developed “almost by accident” where bugs and glitches were turned into features.
Game feel
An Article by Dave RupertHow do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry.
When Customer Journeys Don’t Work: Arcs, Loops, & Terrain
An Article by Stephen P. AndersonThinking [in terms of loops and arcs] allows us to let go of a specific journey or sequence, and imagine dozens of scenarios and possible sequences in which these skills can be learned. This doesn’t mean there aren’t more fundamental skills that other skills build upon, but we can let go the tyranny of how, precisely, a person will move through a system. We’re free to zoom in and obsess on these loops, which does two things for us:
- Approach the design of a system as the design of these as small but significant moments of learning.
- Consider the many ways these loops might be sequenced, with the exact order being less important.
If we were allowed to visit
A Poetry CollectionIf We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.
As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.
Withered or seasoned?
An Article by Robin SloanThe Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.
This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.
[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.
Crashlands: Design by Chaos
A Talk by Seth Coster
Towards a New Architecture
The house is a machine for living in
But men live in old houses
It is not right that we should produce bad things because of a bad tool; nor is it right that we should waste our energy, our health and our courage because of a bad tool; it must be thrown away and replaced.
But men live in old houses and they have not yet thought of building houses adapted to themselves.
Primitive resources
There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources.
Employs nothing at all
The man of today planes to perfection a board with a planing machine in a few seconds. The man of yesterday planed a board reasonably well with a plane. Very primitive man squared a board very badly with a flint or a knife. Very primitive man employed a unit of measurement and regulating lines in order to make his task easier. The Greek, the Egyptian, Michaelangelo or Blondel employed regulating lines in order to correct their work and for the satisfaction of their artist’s sense and of their mathematical thought. The man of today employs nothing at all and the result is the boulevard Raspail.
All the work of an epoch
Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character.
Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style.
Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.A taste for fresh and clear daylight
Tail pieces and garlands, exquisite ovals where triangular doves preen themselves or one another, boudoirs embellished with “poufs” in gold and black velvet, are now no more than the intolerable witnesses to a dead spirit. These sanctuaries stifling with elegance, or on the other hand with the follies of “Peasant Art,” are an offense.
We have acquired a taste for fresh and and clear daylight.
Eyes which do not see
Our epoch is fixing its own style day by day. It is there under our eyes—Eyes which do not see.
The problem of the house has not yet been stated
The lesson of the airplane is not primarily in the forms it has created, and above all we must learn to see in an airplane not a bird or a dragon-fly, but a machine for flying; the lesson of the airplane lies in the logic which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to its successful realization. When a problem is properly stated, in our epoch, it inevitably finds its solution.
The problem of the house has not yet been stated.
At the Green Mosque
In Broussa in Asia Minor, at the Green Mosque, you enter by a little doorway of normal human height; a quite small vestibule produces in you the necessary change of scale so that you may appreciate, as against the dimensions of the street and the spot you come from, the dimensions with which is is intended to impress you. Then you can feel the noble size of the mosque and your eyes can take its measure. You are in a great white marble space filled with light. Beyond you can see a second similar space of the same dimensions, but in half-light and raised on several steps (repetition in a minor key); on each side still a smaller space in subdued light; turning round, you have two very small spaces in shade.
From full light to shade, a rhythm. Tiny doors and enormous bays. You are captured, you have lost the sense of the common scale. You are enthralled by a sensorial rhythm (light and volume) and by an able use of scale and measure, into a world of its own which tells you what it set out to tell you.
Poems of an Indian summer
To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.
A grave and noble beauty
An architecture of our own age is slowly but surely shaping itself; its main lines become more and more evident. The use of steel and reinforced concrete construction; of large areas of plate glass; of standardized units (as, for example, in metal windows); of the flat roof; of new synthetic materials and new surface treatments of metals that machinery made possible; of hints taken from the airplane, the motor-car or the steamship where it was never possible, from the beginning, to attack the problem from an academic standpoint—all these things are helping, at any rate, to produce a twentieth-century architecture whose lineaments are already clearly traceable. A certain squareness of mass and outline, a criss-cross or “grid-iron” treatment with an emphasis on the horizontals, an extreme bareness of wall surface, a pervading austerity and economy and a minimum of ornament; these are among its characteristics. There is evolving, we may begin to suppose, a grave and classical architecture whose fully developed expression should be of a noble beauty.