The Creative Applications-blog has got a very good read about good ways to organize visual patch programming languages like vvvv or maxMSP. It deals about top-down and commented vs. chaotic and almost non-organized. It talks about levels of complexity as well. The article talks also about aesthetics. Sure, if we are honest, we all foremost like patching languages not only because the are handy, but also because they most often look extremely pleasing to the eye.
Some Demosceners came up with the idea “how much music you can make with one line of code“. It didn’t take long, and some guys came up with some code to experiment with: just put it some strangely technical code onto the software and let the result be heard. After that it didn’t take long and some other guy build a JavaScript-environmnt around this program to make it on the web. After that, some visualizing goodness was added to the thing. You can try it out for yourself at this site.
And this is how it looks like:
Cool thing – it remembers me on some other experiments from the last years, like Tweet-a-sound, Tweetcoding in ActionScript3 or demo in less than 140 characters.
This is a talk of Marius Watz from the Eyeo Festival. It about code, form, art and code as a form of art… ;) (Sorry for this pun.) Indeed code and code as an expressive artistic medium is one of the topics, that really interests me right at the moment. There will be stuff going on by the way, I will post some news in few weeks. (Just a hint, I work on a scripting-framework for FabLabs and CNC-machines). Okay, enough from me, let’s roll the talk!
Petri Purho, known to the most people as Klooniegames for his quite successful game Crayon Physics Deluxe (this is also part of the Humble IndieGame Bundle 3 by the way), held a talk at the Assembly 2011. He talks about why “being poor or having no budget is good for making games”. It is about making decisions based upon limitation and how this pushes being creative on the subject of innovation.
The Quote-Unquote blog features interviews with indie-game-developers – almost a must read for everyone. Much of things to learn and explore. For example Adam Atomic says about the polishing of games something, that I think is really well said:
“If prototyping is the process of experiments and accidents and exploration, then polishing is the process of analyzing whether each of those experiments or accidents helped or hindered this particular game. We can visualize a prototype as a 2D sine wave. The crests are areas of the game that stick out in a bad way, that need to be sanded down or chopped off entirely. The troughs are areas of the game that are incomplete or under-explored, and need to be filled in with interesting things. The end result is that instead of a wobbly sine wave, we have a nice smooth surface.”
Gamification is on debate. There are arguments towards and against them. Here I pick a great text, that warn about the dangers of gamification. It argues, that gamification is mostly about extrinsic motivation – but the more valuable motivation is the intrinsic, that comes from within.
In a 1973 study on motivation, Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett found that children who expected (and were given) a reward of a gold star and a ribbon for drawing pictures spent less time playing with the drawing materials in subsequent observations than children who were assigned to an unexpected reward condition and to children who received no extrinsic reward. Similar studies with college students have shown that people who are not offered a reward will work longer and harder on a given puzzle than people who are offered a reward.
This thought is not mentioned in the text, but is somehow at hand: while gamification can be a nice tool for things like Groupon, it somehow makes the problems in the global monetary system more than obvious. Because the game-rules can be so much stronger than anything else. Whether you fit into it or not.
I think this is especially interesting in a play(ful), game-designers context. Because it is also a little bit about getting stuff done vs. playful behaviour. I can only encourage you to read this text. In the end I figured out, that gamification is/can be really about EVERYTHING that is. Really a mind-opener in some ways that leaves some perplexing thoughts behind. (via)
Here is the link to a talk from Maxis Creative Director Stone Librande who made one game for his kids every year in the last 15 years. He shows the games, explains his design goals and foremost, the design lessions learned from making this games and playing them with his kids.
A highly recommended talk for people, who want to peek into the art and craft of making games. There are good lessions also for game design veterans, for example, that items could be as important as goals.
