05.10.12 |
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Frequently asked questions:
Q: How do I install this?
A: Um… are you stupid or something? Just attackclone the grit repo pushmerge, then rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module – and presto!
05.10.12 |
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About an hour after reading that Taylor Clark opinion in Kotaku, I saw a recommend over at Giant Bomb to check out this counterpoint. It’s also quite eloquent:
The very second you try to wrap actions like those in a “good story” that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story. The dissonance of the Uncharted series is a famous example: the experience implies two completely different worlds. One is where Nathan Drake is an affable hero, and the other is where Drake murders hundreds of fellow human beings and feels nothing. Though the developers took care to paint over the seams where they could, even the cleverest narrative design couldn’t change how completely incongruous that really is, on a basic, fundamental level.
At that point— with the model already broken, what can you do as a writer? Make your main character a sensitive man and he falls flat: he obviously isn’t sensitive to the fact that he just killed dozens of people. Make him a dangerous psychopath and he’s impossible to like, unless, maybe, he’s out for some lazily justified revenge (oh, look, we just stumbled on the plot of so many games!).
05.10.12 |
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I had a lot of problems with the Jonathan Blow article I cited last week. Yet Taylor Clark, the Atlantic author who wrote the piece, wrote an opinion article on Kotaku clarifying his stance. I find it much more agreeable, especially with this point:
My issue, then, is with what we might call the intellectual maturity level of mainstream games. It’s not the design mechanics under the hood that I find almost excruciatingly sophomoric at this point; it’s the elements of these games that bear on human emotion and intellectual sophistication, from narrative and dialogue right on down to their core thematic concepts.
05.09.12 |
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Leave it to someone on Reddit to post shots of awesome 8-bit gaming mug. Clever.
05.09.12 |
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Ars Technica’s design refresh is great. I especially dig the Noticia headline font; it gives a soft, approachable look when compared against other tech websites.
05.09.12 |
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Nice analysis by Zach Baron over at Grantland on how The Avengers easily eclipsed the quality of almost everything released in the summer of 2011:
On the likely chance you’ve blocked the months of May, June, July, and August of last year out of your mind forever, let’s try to make this as brief and non-traumatic as possible. There was the colossally ill-advised attempt to make a star out of Ryan Reynolds and a successful movie franchise out of Green Lantern, a beloved comic book with a wholly impenetrable native mythology (something about “the emerald energy of willpower” and the color yellow, I think). In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay forced real-life American hero Buzz Aldrin to salute one CGI robot and nearly raped Rosie Huntington-Whiteley with the creepy animated tendrils of another. And on it went — the sound-stage costume buffoonery of Avengers precursor Thor; X-Men: First Class, a good, kitschy insta-reboot that disappeared into the swamp of a hundred other comic book movies…
Don’t quite agree with his negative take on Thor and especially X-Men: First Class (both are underrated), but Zach makes many excellent points here, both on The Avengers and summer movies in general.
05.09.12 |
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Technology Review’s Jason Pontin, in a frank assessment of publishing and tablet apps:
A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead…
…I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we’re redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we’ll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5.
Many argue that native apps are our future. Some industries where processor speed is key (e.g. gaming) will stay native for quite a while. However, as this article illustrates, the first wave of tablet apps for publishing are a failure. I expect Newsstand to be a failure. Publishing understands the openness and fluidity of the web is the way to go and I think many more industries will follow suit to HTML as well.
05.08.12 |
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So Paydirt, a time tracking and invoicing web app, just ditched support for IE completely and landed on the front page of Hacker News. Cool, but read the fine print: 1.63% of their traffic is from IE. Repeat, less than 2%. For Paydirt’s browser distribution, this is a no-brainer. But ditching IE is impossible for most, if not nearly all web sites out there.
05.08.12 |
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When I first heard about this listening to an episode of The Industry podcast my first reaction was “wait, another to-do list app?”. This one looks pretty cool though: full syncing on iPhone, iPad and web with a streamlined interface and it apparently will be free.
It’s not out yet but I’m keeping my eye on this one once it reaches the App Store.
05.08.12 |
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The Atlantic‘s Daniel Snyder makes an excellent point about one key Black Widow scene in The Avengers (warning, spoilers ahead):
During an attack on the heli-carrier in the second act, Romanoff becomes trapped in the lower engine decks with Bruce Banner, who loses control and becomes his unstoppable raging alter-ego, the Hulk. Her attempts to reason with him fail, and soon she is running for her life through the bowels of the ship, chased by the unthinking green mass of rage. The Hulk swats her against the wall like a mere insect before the Norse God of Thunder, Thor, intervenes. When next we see her, the Black Widow is cowering in the corner. The look on her face is that of a woman utterly broken.
When I watched the film last weekend I didn’t consider this scene at all; it felt lost in the midst of all the bombast. If Hawkeye and or Black Widow eventually get their own movie – being the weaker “mortal side” of The Avengers squad – this human vulnerability could be a really interesting angle to explore.