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."

"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?"

""I love you so much," he would say, if he could read his evolutionary impulses, "because you have a symmetrical face!" "Oh, how I love the smell of your compatible genes!" I would say back. "Symmetrical face!" "Compatible genes!" "Symmetrical face!" "Compatible genes!" And so we would osculate (kiss)."

"Cheese is plentiful in all holds of Skyrim, which gave me a first vector to channel my energies towards once the Breezehome was mine. Wheels and wedges soon became my most sought-after loot. I’d even re-enter cleared dungeons immediately on exit, thinking I’d missed one. I was dumping cheese in Lydia’s bedroom from the day I got the keys and within a few weeks, had filled one corner to the ceiling and covered her bed in eidar stilton. However, my cheese hoarding came to an end 100 hours in, when the game intervened to save itself. A friend challenged me to do Unrelenting Force in my cheese room. The frame rate immediately hit single digits – and has never fully recovered."

"The majority of people have a basic desire to be honest - and I mean actually honest, rather than some limited definition based strictly on the law. People will go to reasonable lengths to be honest. It makes us feel good about ourselves, and it confers a certain immunity from legal problems."

"Sandbagging describes someone who underperforms (usually deliberately) in an event. The term has multiple uses, such as a driver who competes in an event in a series below their level of expertise to finish high."

"begged me to be honest with him. He was frustrated by the responses he'd gotten from friends, because he felt they were going easy on him, and he wanted real criticism. They never do, of course. What they want is a few tough notes to give the illusion of honesty, and then some pats on the head."

"I know it’s wrong but I really want to see someone do an object persona document for something ridiculous like an alarm clock with a personality of a US Marines drill instructor."

"Globalization has brought about an age when the only tests used to judge anyone's behavior are: Does it make you money or its equivalent? Did you get away with it?" "Why is this so? It's the only set of behavioral tests that are globally portable."

"My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die."

"As the developer of Dwarf Fortress puts it 'failing is fun'" "The key player skill then becomes recognising when the player is in an exploitable situation and taking advantage of the opportunity to collect useful resources, versus an evasion situation, where the player should continue moving and avoid any imminent threats. This reaches a logical conclusion through the what is known in Angband as diving, where a player descends as quickly as possible through the dungeon, stopping only when exploits obviously present themselves - a technique very similar to speed running non-procedurally generated games."

Thinking about this in terms of human-machine, machine-human, and machine-machine interactions.

Fascinating posts about UGC game design going wrong, and exactly why Eskil Steenburg is wrong when he says "Fire your game designer". On the internet and everywhere, people are looking for sugar. We regard immediate treats well on a short timescale, but quickly get bored of them and look back fondly on challenge. Without an accounting for this, UGC game design coupled with throughput of newbies will kill games that try it, or, as they point out, at least put the costs up.

"Archigram thought of behaviour as the raw material they were building with". They also used the term "social software" in 1972... motherfuck the fringe is hard to mine for valuables! :0

Absolutely fascinating article about POW camp economics: "On 12th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organization and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort."

Stigmergy drives fuckery