"This last example points to the basic "design decision" which makes a difference here: Add something. Change it up. Make it different. Put your own stamp on the game system, not just the skin. That is what starts to cross over from pure cloning, 1-to-1 structural-copying and reskinning, into something more. It's what made Cake Mania a much better game than Roller Rush, and it's what David Sirlin did with Flash Duel. Evolution: it's inherently not cloning."

"Guest blogger Courtney Stanton explains how she organized a game developer conference with 50% women speakers." <-- correct approach. Hidden agenda, not a PR talking point.

Held on a weekend, no panels.

"we're at a time where developers and publishers are turning their back on Android due to all the problems the market has, rather than embracing it."

"What’s fascinating to me about the LRAD — or “Long Range Acoustic Device” — is the way violence and speech become literally the same thing."

Sworcery artwork; lovely.

Portraits with gale force winds.

The best of each thing, in that writer's opinion. Has some good finds.

"there's something I love about such claims, the boldness of saying "you're all doing it wrong, your taste is wrong, this is how things should be done and I'm going to do it better to prove it to you!". It's a fantastic motivation to make stuff."

"In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is."

"Telling me that you have listened to my opinion is great. Thanks. And thanks for letting me know that you aren’t going to be taking that opinion seriously until there are more women gamers or less sexism in the world, because you are a business and have to make business decisions. So, if I want to be successful in getting the kind of fantasy art I would like to see in D&D, I need to create more women gamers and eliminate more sexism. I’ll get right on that."

"The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012."

"Guests visiting the famed naturalist in 1868 were shown a set of “ghoulish” photos of a guy being prodded in the face with an electrical current. Darwin then asked his guests-cum-guinea pigs to describe the emotion displayed in each photo."

"So what is George Lucas going to do with his property now that he's tired of his rich neighbors putting up a not-in-my-backyard stink? He wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, "If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.""

"Right now, we’re scanning a Duesenberg body. It’s a classic example of high tech melding with old tech. There are cars sitting in garages around the country, and they haven’t moved in years for lack of some unobtainable part."

'So here we are more than a year later, and gamification is as close as my local Wells Fargo ATM, it says “You’ve earned a new badge: Express Depositor”'

'One morning you woke up and said, very seriously, "I feel really weird." I was so relieved.
"Me, too!" I said. "This really isn't working, is it?"
There was a very long silence. "I meant about that ham I had yesterday night."'

"The best examples of how awesome people are to each other in LD are the game reviews and the posts on favorites. There is a lot of effort put into encouraging people to see the qualities of their games and how to improve. No matter how unfinished the state of the game, sometimes even unplayable, the comments are always incredibly encouraging. There is always something awesome about it."

Good resource to point people to.

Japan move to reign in gambling mechanics: "The Consumer Affairs Agency has concluded that a system used by some online game operators on social networking service (SNS) websites constitutes a violation of a law that bans certain types of sales methods, according to sources close to the agency. In such online games, known as "kompu gacha" (complete gacha), players can win a grand prize, a rare virtual item, after purchasing a certain number of required items."

"Double-click on or move the original map to set a marker on a desired location. The antipode map will automatically show it's antipodal location."

"How many of you have invested in a cool thing on Kickstarter only to receive constant emails about how expensive tooling is, or how hard it is to source PSU’s, or how the team massively under-budgeted the production? There have been many projects which simply ground to a halt because the Matter Battle was just too tough, before we even get into the debating the dubious legal position of these devices (CE mark anyone?)"

"You think software, or electronics is hard? Making a box chewed me up and spat me out. It’s not too hard to make the ragged, ugly holes I did, but gosh, I’d love the precision and experience to not have scratches from skittering milling bits, or the ragged holes around the LCD. Not to mention the entire rebuild of the project necessary to get it small enough to fit into aforementioned box."

"Ultimately, a programmer’s job is less to actually write code, and more to manage complexity. Obviously you need to build features and meet deadlines, but the code itself is incidental. Hypothetically, if you could build features without writing code — such as by making a configuration change — then you should. When you do have to write code, though, it’s your job to write the simplest possible code as much as it is to build the feature at hand."

Michael Brough justifies design decisions for iThing rougue-like, against fans and pundits opinions and suggestions. Excellent.

"Lest we forget, Safe Media’s stating objectives don;t stop at just pornography…

"to minimise the availability of potentially harmful media content displaying violence, pornography and explicit sex, bad language and anti-social behaviour and the portrayal of drugs""

"he says something along the lines of: tastes are primarily based on distastes. It seems there is a similar problem in the conceptualisation of gender norms, not only are feminine and masculine held up against one another as oppositions but their supposed common gender attributes and behaviours only really seem to exist in terms of anxieties of being not masculine or feminine. Gendered behaviour and performance is certainly frequently judged as what it is not."

Fascinating approach to gender and gender-based problems in the design of Dance Central. '"It's sad to me to think that we're the entertainment industry, and we're the most technologically advanced of all the entertainment industries, and yet we seem to be lacking in a social progressivism that matches our technological progressivism," Boch reflects. "I want to turn that around."'

"with a direct-sales force that’s been on the ground for a whole eight weeks, Draw Something is inserting advertisers’ paid terms into the game for players to literally draw brands."

:I guess it’s also worth pointing out that people shared links and phone numbers for suicide hotlines throughout the thread. One of the top-voted comments was a list of support hotlines. It’s good to know that a popular reaction among anonymous readers wasn’t to antagonize or poke fun, but to offer help."

"If you hang out with industrial designers, one thing you may have noticed is that they’re really into chairs."

"by saying video games can only be dumb, we’re doing the medium a great disservice. In the 18th century there was a widely held perception that novels could only be dumb, until classics began to emerge and a canon formed. Video gaming has been around for a much shorter time and has much farther to go before it reaches maturity – technology is still not stable, barriers to entry are still falling rapidly, the business model is still all over the place"

Fascinating details: "There were coloring books, puzzles, games and handy toys for fidgety patrons. Signalers on either side of the stage raised green glow sticks to warn theatergoers of upcoming loud noises or to signal that clapping was ahead."

"The individual developer takes all the risk and the very best they can hope for is to be paid, eventually, if the game does well, but with every chance they won’t get paid at all. There’s no upside. Working for no money up front is a risk, of course, but with a fair, uncapped revenue share deal, the chance of not being paid at all is balanced against the possibility of earning big should the game go on to be a financial success."

"Over time, I found my eyes drifting to tweets from folks with the lowest Klout scores. They talked about things nobody else was talking about. Sitcoms in Haiti. Quirky museum exhibits. Strange movie-theater lobby cards from the 1970s. The un-Kloutiest’s thoughts, jokes, and bubbles of honest emotion felt rawer, more authentic, and blissfully oblivious to the herd. Like unloved TV shows, these people had low Nielsen ratings—no brand would ever bother to advertise on their channels. And yet, these were the people I paid the most attention to. They were unique and genuine. That may not matter to marketers, and it may not win them much Klout. But it makes them a lot more interesting."

"Twitterbombing is a tactic that forces us to think about the ethics of attention. We may believe that Reese and Athene are engaged in a deeply important cause – does that mean we’re ethically justified in asking someone else to pay attention?"

"However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene."

"Radcliffe goes on to say that "Some of us have learned from experience that small-breasted women often have larger minds", making full use of his Boob Science degree from Sensitive Dudes University"

"TapLogger […] masquerades as a benign game that challenges the end user to identify identical icons from a collection of similar-looking images. In the background, the trojan monitors readings returned by the phone's built-in accelerometer, gyroscope, and orientation sensors to infer phone numbers and other digits entered into the device."

"Gone are the days of the scrappy underdog, throwing a hammer through the window of conformity, and what has emerged is … well, it’s far worse than what it was rebelling against."

A great resource

"2. We're bundling young people into things called startups, and selling them to investors for ever-increasing amounts of money.
3. In an effort to bring more suckers in, they just passed a law that makes it legal to pimp these startups to people who don't know anything. You will be able to take their investment by swiping a credit card. Probably using a $4 billion valuation Square dongle for an iPhone."

We'll see: "The plan is this: get people invested, fail to deliver but show progress to whet people’s appetites. Then do a new fundraising drive to finish the game, and ultimately end up with up to twice the original budget, if not even more. "

"the <blink> tag will probably be remembered as the most hated of all HTML tags. I would like to publicly state that at no time did I actually write code or even seriously advocate for the <blink> tag. It is true that I put forth the initial inspiration, but it really was merely a thought experiment. I am not going to name any names of the people who coded the dastardly deed"

"This is about how Internet technology used to feel like it was really going to change so many things about our lives. Now it has and we're all too stunned to figure out what's next."

"I wanted to buy some half-price chocolate at WH Smith but wasn't offered any and didn't want to make a scene." "I'm shouting the answers to this Radio 4 quiz, but the idiots keep getting it wrong nonetheless."

'When I crossed the finish line, it wasn't like "Wow! I did it - I did my first marathon". It was like "Wow! I've got a life plan!"'

"My observation is that it takes new hires about six months before they fully accept that no one is going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most valuable resource in the company – their time – by figuring out what it is that they can do that is most valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if they decide that they should be doing something different, there’s no manager to convince to let them go; they just move their desk to the new group (the desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start in on the new thing."

Another crowdfunding platform, UK based

"It is an honor and a privilege to present the first review anywhere for THE MATRIX RELOADED, a pleasure that is compounded only by the karmically-perfect concept that it is none other than Neill Cumpston who has seen it first."

"Being labeled the most intellectual man in video games is a little like being called the most chaste woman in a brothel"

First review: "DO NOT PUT ON KNOB AND BOLLOCKS. Being a loose cannon who does not play by the rules the first thing I did was ignore the warning and smear this all over my knob and bollocks. The bollocks I knew and loved are gone now. In their place is a maroon coloured bag of agony which sends stabs of pain up my body every time it grazes against my thigh or an article of clothing. I am suffering so that you don't have to. Heed my lesson. DO NOT PUT ON KNOB AND BOLLOCKS. (I am giving this product a 5 because despite the fact that I think my bollocks might fall off, they are now completely hairless.)"

"30,000 km2 [11,500 square miles] in Chernobyl's surroundings constitutes an ecological trap that causes dramatic excess mortality. How creepy is that? Vibrant bird song as a sign of death and destruction."

“Sir, there is actually no need for you to take your trousers off.”
“Thank you. I thought not.”

"Let's start to work on this and see what would happen if we change the somehow boring hackerspaces of the present into some glamorous factories of an unpredictable freedom for all of us even those who do not fit in the classical nerd scheme. Change the nerds. Make them a better space. For you and for me and the entire human race."

Reading champion: "I don't read books". "I think I am a Reading Champion because I enjoy the fact you learn things from reading."

"Star Wars Kinect is the ultimate, inevitable expression of the new commercial truth of Hollywood that began with little plastic versions of Luke Skywalker"

Minimus has a complete USB stack, so with a little work and hardware can translate any game controller input into USB.

"Our main shopping spend went out of town years ago, and is now going online. If the government money helps us do some radical rethinking about what our high streets are for, that's excellent. If it just tries to subsidise activities that are declining it will be wasted."

"I would write my OWN bot, that responded to TWSS with a quotation from a notable woman. If they are so keen on what she said, why don’t we get educated about what she really had to say. And so the “whatshereallysaid” bot was born."

"Today Facebook, Twitter and text messaging allow teenagers and 20-somethings to connect without wheels. High gas prices and environmental concerns don’t help matters."

They sell bamboo shirts

Mirrors shaped like humans left in woods. Ideal way to spook people.