"If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation." (Michael Abrash is scary smart, at Valve, investigating wearable computing, but this line - about the value of being first and being innovative - was the most important here for me.)

"When I'm evaluating entrepreneurs and their ideas, I look for "innovation bipolarity," a version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Entrepreneurs should be able to argue passionately that their idea will change the world, and then, without skipping a beat, honestly assess the risks standing in the way of its success and describe what they are doing to mitigate them."

"Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience." Craft / scenius / place / knowledge. The W Brian Arthur sounds great, and Matt's point - that building strength in a sector is building culture, and that requires investment in something that won't see immediate returns (rather than "five-year plans" and "strategies") is acute. Very good stuff.

"The best signpost to the future I know is to follow whatever happens after the word "computational."" Kevin Kelly being smart/interesting/as usual.

In which Laura Parker looks at what "mainstream" games can learn from the type of success indie titles such as Limbo have had, with contributions from Nels Anderson, Manveer Heir, and - would you believe it - me. It's a really nice feature; I hope Laura can get more of this sort of stuff published on Gamespot, because it deserves a bigger audience than being buried on the staff blog.

This is great. Brandon is smart. And: when he says "story", he doesn't mean story. He just means "show me something new".

"It fools the government into thinking Local Development Agencies (LDAs) attract young creative people in “the regions”, and it fails to support the local young talent who probably prefer hanging out with their laptop in a place with perfect coffee. After all that’s how the Royal Society was created… I’ve been up and down the UK and those innovation spaces have the worst coffee in the universe. Just saying."

"In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad shouldn’t be Spider-Man 5, Ke$ha’s third album, or the ePub ver sion of Annabel Scheme. If that’s all we’ve got, it will mean that Apple suc ceeded at invent ing a new class of device… but we failed at invent ing a new class of content. In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad should be… jeez, you know, I think it should be art."

"Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered. Too much innovation means you'll have to individually teach each user how to love your product and you don't have time for that." Justin Hall on the end of PMOG/The Nethernet, and lessons learned.

Lovely demo - some interesting interfaces that feel quicker than current alternatives, as well as experimental ones that, whilst slower and clumsier, represent information a bit better. I mainly like the form-factor, though - but what's the unit cost? These things get a lot better the more you have.

"Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.

"The first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March 2009 as part of Newcastle ScienceFest - a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation." Never been to Newcastle. That could be exciting.

"Don't be stuck staring at the screen! Mightier's unique puzzles are designed to be solved by hand with pencil and paper." You print out the puzzle, solve it with a pen, take a webcam picture of it... and the in-game laser carves the path you drew. Wow.

"The point in pointing out these numbers, since we’re throwing out analogies to films and videogame innovation, is that it seems that no matter how well a movie is interpreted as “innovative” by a reviewer, the truest mark of success lies in its ability to inure itself with the consumer." No. Commercial success is just one kind of success, and films like Eraserhead have had a far greater impact on young filmmakers than any amount of box-office smashes. The real rarities are films such as the Godfather or Citizen Kane, which manage to be box-office smashes and innovative masterpiece.

"The 'better sequel' mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don't want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I'm willing to blunder through if I'm going to get an experience I never had before." And this is why I've been sticking with it; I think Keith is on the right lines with this quotation.

"Innovation seems to mean doing something so significantly different that you alienate the userbase that should be familiar with your product. More applaudable, in my mind, are those games that smuggle in small amounts of unique and exciting gameplay that enhances the experience without fundamentally redefining it... Warhammer Online is a game that abounds with this kind of innovation. From elements that are purely new and thought provoking, to small gameplay tweaks that subtly push new perspectives on tired MMO cliches, there is a lot of good stuff to be found in the game." Brandon Reihnart takes a look at WAR.

Great selection of posts on how brands need to behave (and how they sometimes fail to do so) from Grant McCracken.

"SOWN 2008 will shine the spotlight on game developers who are seeking new possibilities of expression through the medium of games and will serve as a vehicle for a new style of presentation that broadens the possibilities of games."

Not quite sure what point Poynor's trying to make; in many ways, his list of examples at the end really is a list of design thinking examples - architecture, engineering, etc, seen with a design hat on. Lots of statements I'm uncomfortable with in this.

"I've been thinking about a number of new product ideas lately. In doing so, I've been trying to come up with a way more structured way of evaluating them. Here's a first attempt at defining that." Evan Williams on product.

"Games create conceptual touchstones - shared references that bridge different points of view and provide a common platform for conversation. That’s what most design deliverables try to do, with varying degrees of success."

"Reducing the movement of matter - whether goods, or people - is a main challenge in the transition to sustainability." The other two lines are as good.

Tiny folding bike with tiny wheels from Clive Sinclair. Paul had one last night - looked fairly reasonable for the money, but not for long commutes...

"The classic controller was something [...] gamers had become comfortable with. It had many important elements. But it also had come to dictate a lot of what went into games... Creativity was being stifled, and the range of games was narrowing."

What defines a project? Sometimes there are small projects. Google News took a team of 3-5 people. If you take a pool of engineers and put them in teams of three, you can actually do 100 projects.

The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

Could be handy...

Asynchronous voice messaging for underdeveloped/poor countries; compete with post, not phone.