Adactio: Links—Tagged with games

Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game

This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.

as days pass by — Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022

Stuart writes up the process up making a mobile game as a web app—not a native app. The Wordle effect reverberates.

It’s a web app. Works for everyone. And I thought it would be useful to explain why it is, why I think that’s the way to do things, and some of the interesting parts of building an app for everyone to play which is delivered over the web rather than via app stores and downloads.

Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com

The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern: selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.

Wiki History Game

This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.

Gaming the Iron Curtain

The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:

Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.

I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.

The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds | Platypus

When the game developer Blizzard Entertainment decommissioned some of their server blades to be auctioned off, they turned them into commemorative commodities, adding an etching onto the metal frame with the server’s name (e.g., “Proudmoore” or “Darkspear”), its dates of operation, and an inscription: “within the circuits and hard drive, a world of magic, adventure, and friendship thrived… this server was home to thousands of immersive experiences.” While stripped of their ability to store virtual memory or connect people to an online game world, these servers were valuable and meaningful as worlds and homes. They became repositories of social and spatial memory, souvenirs from WoW.

How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson

Six UX lessons from game design:

Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)

Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)

Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)

Affordances (Prompt for known loops)

Hintiness (Move to new loops)

Pacing (Be sure to start here)

Turing Tumble - Build Marble-Powered Computers

Boolean logic manifested in a Turing-complete game

Telepresence - daverupert.com

Dave is liking the word “telepresence”:

On social media we broadcast our presence and thoughts over radio and wire and I likewise consume your projections as they echo back to me. We commune over TCP/IP.

Just wait until he discovers the related neologism coined by Ted Nelson.

Progressive Web Games – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

I was just talking about how browser-based games are the perfect use-case for service workers. Andrzej Mazur breaks down how that would work:

Add to Home screen
Offline capabilities
Progressive loading

TANK (short film by Stu Maschwitz) - YouTube

This fun little film gives me all the feels for Battlezone …but then watching the excellent “making of” video really made me appreciate the love and attention to detail that went into this.

I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic

Robin Sloan smushes the video game Fortnite Battle Royale together with Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy and produces a perfect example of game theory, cooperation, and the prisoner’s dilemma.

Based on my experiments in the laboratory of Fortnite, I think Liu Cixin is wrong. Or at least, he’s not entirely right. Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”

List of Brighton & Hove Design, Development, and Various Other Tech / Nerdy Meetups

An up-to-date list of Brighton design and dev meet-ups. There’s quite a few!

My favourite books (and games) about the apocalypse

Plague; zombie; nuclear …Anna’s got them all covered in her roundup of apocalyptic literature and games.

Welcome to Interactive Fiction: You’re a Wizard-Sniffing Pig - Atlas Obscura

The fascinating history of interactive fiction from adventure game to hypertext.

The split between parsers and hyperlinks reminds me of different approaches to chatbots: free text entry vs. constrained input.

A Personal History of the Text Adventure – Read-Only Memory

Naomi Alderman:

The text adventure, like poetry, tends to attract a small band of devoted fans rather than hundreds of millions of casual players. And yet, those who care about writing know that they are where the form starts; and I can’t help feeling that videogames in general would be better if they took as much care over their words, and over their narratives, as text adventures do.

Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines, my sharp eyes, and other technical knowledge, I have overcome the limited amount of information available in the video content of WarGames and with complete certainty identified the exact name and issue number of the magazine read on screen by David L. Lightman in WarGames.

Link tags: games

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