I think toys are a big part of games. And they're largely forgotten about.

As El Schell says, to build a good game, first build a beautiful toy.

Wow, very cool. RT @mfeathers: This is one of the coolest things I've seen all month. Seriously:

Why aren't there more people making musical instruments? I mean new musical instruments, like this?

This looks really good. Data-driven life toy with things like bowel movements and stuff like that.

What the frak are we going to do with all this data? Some of the stuff we're finding out is astonishing simply because the size of the things make you think they should have been discovered before. I'm guessing there's stuff that's smaller too - it's difficult to shake the feeling we're all being stalked by our own cognitive biases. What else will we discover?

An AI (erm, not really) chatbot which helps people decide if they want to join the army.

It doesn't appear to learn, so it's more like a Choose Your Own Adventure than anything else.

There's so many of these informatics toys. Who uses them? I don't know anybody, as yet. Informatics is great fun. Data entry sucks rank ass.

This is one of those informatics things that aren't really games. But they are very much like toys - and toys are easy to play games with.

I strongly suspect that the toys will outlive all the add-a-game-mech anti-games.

"[Dept of Infinite Chaos] Poyozo, a highly advanced, helpful-looking digi-life mgmt tool. I will never, ever use it " says @goodmachine

And I wonder if I will. But there's something here in this.