-
I wrote the cover article for this month’s issue of Icon magazine! Huge thanks to Priya Kanchandani for reaching out with this opportunity. The article is an overview of spatial narrative, with a particular focus on titles that have been included in the V&A’s big videogames exhibition, such as Journey, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Last of Us. It’s a good time for “games as architecture” readings, with Heterotopias zine having provided an attractive home for architecturally-inclined games criticism, and architects such as my friend Claris Cyarron doing good work in the field. -
Reading list
If I had a limitless budget to kit out a new games studio with lovely, physical books, what would I buy? I went through the secondary source list for my work-in-progress Dreamcast Worlds and picked out the most useful and thought-provoking entries.
-
I'm bored of hearing about your wife
@shayhowe "when I think of cleaning up my code, I think of my wife doing the dishes..." #html5devconf
Almost every time I go to a tech- or gaming-related conference, I hear middle-aged white men in suits talk about their wives and children. This would be lovely and rather sweet, were it not for the fact that they all seem to be married to the same woman, and they all seem to be raising the same children.— Chris Smith (@startsequence) October 15, 2012
-
Backer-editing Dreamcast Worlds
I feel obliged to point out that, by popular request, I’ve set up a way for you to pre-order a copy of Dreamcast Worlds if you missed the Indiegogo funding deadline. Just go to this page.
Last week I sent Dreamcast Worlds supporters the first extract from the work-in-progress, and asked what they thought about it. It was the first step in an experiment in ‘crowd-editing’, though in reality, the ‘crowd’ part isn’t really appropriate - it’s more that a small number of backers are generous enough with their time to discuss the book with me and share their opinions. But the principle is that as a self-publishing, crowd-funded writer, I have a direct connection with my audience - and as such, I don’t have to make guesses about what they want from a book. I can just ask them.
-
Jason Lee Weight FTW
Jason Lee Weight (@usernametoobig). Influential Shoreditch dude Edward Saperia desribes him as a ‘“nice guy with nice hair”. His website is here, but there’s nothing there yet other than preposterously fashionable typography and a rotating dog’s head.
I am writing about Jason because he sent 600+ people to visit my indiegogo project. In terms of sheer volume Jason has done more to signal boost my campaign than anybody else on the planet to date. So in return, I’m going to tell you about his exciting work in storytelling and animation.
-
A quick try with Chromium OS
I gave Chromium OS a try because I wanted the fast, light performance of Bodhi Linux without the bugs, optimised for browsing with Chrome. Chromium OS is not the answer. What I didn’t realise is that Chromium OS is not intended for regular use - it’s a testing platform for features being developed for the official Chrome OS that ships on Chromebooks. Even hearing that, I wasn’t ready for it to be so sorely lacking.
-
GDC poster presentation
Some people have been asking me to upload my GDC poster for months. Sorry for the delay. Here it is! [googleapps domain=“docs” dir=“viewer” query=“url=http%3A%2F%2Fzoyastreet.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F06%2Fposter-sunday-4.pdf&embedded=true” width=“600” height=“400” /] The astounding graphic design is the hard work of my friend Laura Moat. -
A lasting lesson from Ze Frank's Kickstarter campaign
Ze Frank is one of the first ever video bloggers. His show, entitled "The Show", was a daily video blog over 2006-2007. It was funny, thoughtful, innovative, and to this day the quality and quantity of content has been rarely matched by any other video blogger. Recently, Ze has started blogging again, in a show entitled "A Show". His new video blog is funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised almost three times his target, at $146,000.
The lasting lesson from this successful campaign is not that more video bloggers should run Kickstarter campaigns.
-
Winter is coming: the dire landscape of 2011-2012
Game of Thrones is back in the US, and snow is forecast for next week in the UK, leaving a large chunk of the English speaking world immersed in a mythic, winter landscape once again.
-
Nostalgia cascade
Some of my business cards carry the title, ‘Time Lord’. While I don’t own a tardis and only possess one heart, I do travel through space and time, to help people to solve problems. Cultural problems, that they need to resolve in order to succeed in their vocation. And then they pay me, which is important when you’re not actually from Galifrey.
I’m able to be a Time Lord because I’m a historian. However, my vocation is made both more meaningful and more possible by the dramatic shift in the very fabric of cultural history over the past couple of decades. Part of this transformation in the place-time continuum is characterised by the nostalgia cascade.
-
Wired disconnection
Arduino and LEDs showing results of an internet search
This is a quick write-up of an Arduino art consulting job I always intended to find photographs of, to no avail. Given the lack of lovely graphics to encourage your eye down the page, I'll keep it brief.The internet is growing, but as it grows, it is falling apart. This was the message of a communication designer, who came to me asking for an Arduino script and circuit that would fit inside a modem case, and flash LEDs upon receiving an output from other programs, which I didn’t write. The other program was set to search the internet for dead links and other signs of network degradation. It kicked out a file containing the number discovered of each of four types of errors. My component would flash a different light for each type, each time a new fault was discovered in the web.
-
Selling to social selves
Facebook has become more panoptic. In doing so, it is leading the trend towards greater sharing online, a loss of anonymity, and the growth of a huge market in making cyberspace social. Google, threatened by the transformation of the online economy from links to likes, is trying to follow suit, holding services that people have come to depend upon ransom to its real names policy. Facebook’s policy change is, as always, motivated by the desire to increase advertising revenue, by making it easier for advertisers to target users who are most likely to buy particular products and services. This post is about advertising. It’s illustrated with beautiful Shiseido ads that, I suspect, speak not to the social self, but to something that Facebook can’t touch in its current state.
-
Constructing the self
I’m reading Judith Butler on how the self is constructed out of normative gender. It reminds me of a Channel 4 TV series for older teens that I saw when I was a younger teen - I don’t remember the name of the series or any details like character names, all I remember is this one scene. Nevertheless, I appreciate this scene as an example of our intuitive understanding that gender categories are closely tied up with the stability of the self. The scene somehow makes more sense because of the portrayal of the character as outside of hegemonic norms of embodied gender presentation.
-
Representation is chunky and clunky
Science fiction shows used to make the surface appearance of future technologies extra clunky, chunky and cumbersome in order to make them look at once more familiar to the viewer and at the same time more technical and unfriendly. A complex surface appearance is a placeholding sign for the imagined internal physical contents of fictional technological objects. By making an object look easier to deconstruct with a screwdriver, attention is drawn away from the fact that if you were to take these objects apart you’d find nothing inside. It’s funny now to watch Star Trek because the laptop computers and datapads they use are far bulkier and fussier in appearance than the ones we use today, but I don’t think this is just an act of foolishness and shortsightedness on the part of the set designers.
