Over in Second Life, a user has created an emergent artificial life simulation that grows plants, rains, and so on.

Read the rest of this entry »

In response to this, may I suggest

this? No sketching required.

[Edit: link fixed.]

Lately, it seems like a lot of folks in the game industry are talking about ways to get rid of used game sales. There was the rumor about Sony not permitting used games with PS3, which was denied. There’s been plenty of talk about how used game sales and rentals are damaging the game industry among game devs. Even academics are talking about how to reduce resales. Witness this question posed to the rant panel at GDC in 2005:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m behind on this one, but I always like to link to folks doing surveys, so everyone: if you played Façade, go take the Façade Player Survey and help out the creators!

Minor thing, but I switched the search box here on the site from a blog-only search box to one of the Google ones, so that you can search the entire site, blog posts included. I keep seeing search results that are looking for things that are actually on pages in the Gaming section.

You’ll have to set the radio button to search this site only if you want to confine your search to here, but in my tests it’s picked up everything in the blog as well as elsewhere on the site.

Doing something a little bit different again. I have posted this poem before, but I wanted to talk a little bit about taking things away, since I was so recently on the topic of adding things in. And for those of you who don’t usually read the Sunday Poems, this one actually has game design relevance!

Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like someone wrote a little commentary over here. I relied on Google to translate it, as usual.

Every year, an army of Boy and Girl Scouts descend upon the nation’s military cemeteries and plant one flag in front of every headstone. This morning, my kids did this at Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma here in San Diego. There are 85,000 flags to place, and there are enough kids that it takes about an hour to do all the gravesites.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been ages, so it’s time for all you new readers to go add yourselves to the map.

If Tech Companies Made Sudoku is a funny parody, but I think that ironically, it made me think the opposite.

Read the rest of this entry »