This is the typical view you get if you’re riding a London tube train at rush hour. In the morning it’s packed but high-energy and it smells faintly of cologne and coffee. On the way home it’s different. Everyone retreats into their own world even more than normal. They’re tired. They’re packed together. It’s been […]
Read more "Obvious Delight"My self-taught, practical course in level design continues. After a weekend of obsessive forging, I present another multiplayer map for Halo: Reach. Here’s the Beta version of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. This one’s a $10,000 map – I used every cent of Reach’s complexity allowance. It’s built for team slayer or capture the flag, a […]
Read more "Lessons in Level Design: Boulevard"My thoughts about game design have been stirred lately by the creative opportunities afforded by Bungie’s Halo: Reach. As well as being an excellent game in its own right, Reach includes a very powerful level editor with quite easy controls. The learning curve is steep but very short, and it’s entirely possible to be creating […]
Read more "Level Building in Halo: Reach"Here’s a few words I said to kick off BoardGameCamp this morning. It was 9:30 and some people had been traveling a long way. Hi Everyone. Early start today eh? Let’s see who was up the earliest. Seven o’clock? [many hands] Six o’clock? [a couple fewer] Five o’clock? [a handful of people] How about four […]
Read more "Ludo, ergo sum."I’m a big fan of games without a built-in story. For my money, the best thing about games is that they can let players create and experience a story for themselves, rather than smacking them down into a linear narrative someone else has dreamt up. I’m not against linear storytellng at all, mind. I just […]
Read more "Civilization: A Game in Three Acts"Adrian has been writing a fascinating series of posts on Civilization over at mssv. I’m a massive Civ fan myself. I installed the very first version of the game from floppy disks onto my mom’s computer back in 1992. It was a beige IBM desktop, whose processing power would seem puny next to a lot […]
Read more "Scale and Storytelling in Civilization"Kristine Lowe of the Norwegian Online News Association’s blog, picked up on my earlier post on paywalls. I speak a little Swedish, so I can just about understand a little Norwegian. But only just. So please forgive me if I’ve misunderstood. I’m not saying that the Times’ paywall system is necessarily the best answer. But […]
Read more "Paywalls, in Norwegian"Paywalls. Go on, say it. Let the word roll around your tongue. Pay. Walls. . . . They’re evil, right? Keeping the public out, killing openness, dooming your general-interest online publication to irrelevance. Oh, the New York Times tried it in the 90’s, and they came grovelling back. Any generalist website that goes this way […]
Read more "news:rewired – We need to talk about paywalls"Why do journalists focus on story so much? There are other ways of gaining and transmitting understanding. Stories are necessarily limited. A narrative has to use characters, locations, a clear plot. These are necessarily artificial – an abstraction of reality. What about complex systems? Like climate change. Like the national budget. The arms trade. Or […]
Read more "news:rewired"Every year, the Knight Foundation drops millions of dollars on projects that will change the way the news is made. With that kind of money on the line, competition is fierce. Only 12 projects got a grant, out of 2,400 applicants. They’ve just announced their 2010 crop of winners, and there are a couple of […]
Read more "2.74 Million Reasons the News is Changing"
Philip Trippenbach 