trenchant.org

What people are textagonning.

I changed the text to black for the first time in over a decade.

The best thing about being a programmer concerned with usability is that when software is unusable, you can write your own to replace it.

The worst thing is how often you want to write a replacement.

Doug Wheeler’s SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, exhibited at the David Zwirner Gallery [NYT]

This is an exploration of what’s moving and enchanting and fascinating in software applications, videogames and procedural arts, beyond the amusement offered by obeying rules and receiving rewards.

— about notgames

Nice release list as well to help explore this emerging genre.

Just played through Gemini Rue. I really enjoyed it and the aesthetic.

[via top 2011 games from the TIGSource forums]

Can we please revive adventure gaming as a genre with the iPad? I would help fund it.

“Anyway, really what I wanted to tell you is, after all these years, and moves across countries and oceans, I was cleaning yesterday and found your Moby CD.”

“What’s amazing is not only did you outlast my interest in Moby by a decade, but you also outlasted my interest in owning physical media.”

My latest little app — textagon for ios — is now available.

Please download it and make neat word art and share it!

Consider if the actions are destructive or constructive, adding or removing friction.

There are no enemies in FEZ. No bosses, no combat. In fact, no conflict of any kind. You can die, but there is no penalty for doing so. FEZ aims to create a non-threatening world rich with ambiance, a pleasant place to spend time in.

— What is Fez

Gaming at its best creates new places we want to spend time in. That ability is core to what excites me most about the medium.

I still want to see an independent tech weblog that covers the many startups and subjects I never see listed on the current tech blogs. I hate seeing a glowing post about some new startup and know the writer and CEO regularly joke with each other on Twitter. I hate when a popular startup is given a pass because most of the writers attended the founder’s bachelor party or got an exclusive on a new feature.

— Andre Torrez, Backdoor Deals

It’s like the difference between writing about politics and writing about policy.

What we need is more smart writing focused on technology and software rather than the spectacle of it all interspersed with the casual celebratory repetition of press releases, and written by those with domain expertise in software, technology, and product design.

This rings true in all sorts of disciplines, in all kinds of journalistic coverage.

The implicit, underlying assumption of much of journalism is that reality isn’t interesting enough, or comprehensible enough on its own. It needs to be reinterpreted through storytelling with a bias towards conflict, personality, stereotype, conventional wisdom and other tropes that make what is boring and unfamiliar to the writer more palatable to a large audience.

The difference is with the internet, we don’t have to tolerate it anymore.

Although gamification is apparently about “the infusion of game design techniques, game mechanics, and/or game style into anything,” an implicit goal is to transform the attitudes and behavior of users (students, workers, consumers, etc.) to be more like the attitudes and behavior of happy, engaged “gamers.” The problem is, gamification assumes a rattomorphic view of gamers in the appropriation of techniques and principles from games: we’re just like Skinner’s rats, all that is needed is some good old fashioned operant conditioning!

— Terry Schenold, The “Rattomorphism” of Gamification [via]

My new favorite piece of software is GlimmerBlocker.

I set it up to get Safari to search Duck Duck Go by default but then, inspired by Mittens Romney did this.

And it made me think I’d like to subscribe to proxy rules that surprised me or made me laugh every day.

We have a technical apparatus set up to subscribe to rules to remove advertising from our web browsing but very little designed to transform things in unexpected or delightful ways.

Luckily I love to laugh at my own jokes.

Seeing people change avatars on centralized, corporate-sponsored social networks as a political protest reminds me that the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will be live, interspersed with sponsored Tweets™.

Your Congressman is not following you.