"Over at The Border House, they’re having a bit of a backlash against the constant presence of Stubbly White Male Shepard in the marketing for the Mass Effect series.  (Seriously, who is that guy anyway?) Border House writers are posting details of their Shepards, and I was asked if I’d post mine. So, here is something that might give some idea." I'm rather enjoying this series, although this entry in it is probably my favourite.

"Many deep, sophisticated emotions can emerge from those three plots. But they should emerge in the experience, in the actions the players take, in the reactions they receive, in gestures and decisions and deaths and tasks and achieving or failing to achieve a goal. They should not emerge from people sitting around talking to each other in a cartoon." Chris Dahlen on post-GDC09 narrative.

"In both scenarios, the interfaces enabling these quick experiences are DOS-driven. No gradients, no Ajax, no mouse. Fitts’ Law isn’t even of concern. Just alphanumeric characters and keyboard strokes." Character interfaces till rule for ePOS

Today's bacon saver: character set conversion. Mmn.

Wow. Yes, yes, yes, definitely need this.

Also useful, though only works on IE/Windows. Converts to/from Shift-JIS and Unicode encodings, yum