[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing concerning the public release of Chris Crawford’s ‘Storytron’ interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I’ve never believed that there was anything to be gained from the ...
Lindsay Beyerstein on World Cup penalties: At that level, most of the kicks are going to go into the net. Someone ought to tell the England team that. With respect to replays, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that they’re anti-climactic. In England, the FA Cup Final went to a replay in the case ...
In another life, I did some structural analysis of stories. For the sake of practicality, some were as simple as Grimms’ Fairy Tales (various publications insist that they’re “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”, but, dammit, there were two of them). For the sake of seeing how scalable my analysis was, I also ...
Everything that I’ve read about Katamari Damacy is absolutely true, both the good and the bad. It’s a stroke of genius. It’s Tetris-quality game design. I can see how it might not have taken off commercially in the west, though. The games’s framing narrative is wilfully, surreally Japanese, and has ...
It’s not the detail. We pretty soon forget all of that, and — if forced — have to go back to the manual or the text book or whoever taught us the damn thing in the first place. No, what we truly remember of things we learn consists of general principles wrapped up in phrases, ...