In the past few years there have been released a handful of indie games which share a kind of common form and aesthetic, one that strikes a chord with me. This design space is represented in my mind by Kairo, and the upcoming Fract and NaissanceE, though it contains many more.

The quality these games have in common is use a first-person perspective and an experience based around architecture and soundscapes, working in concert to elicit some aesthetic or emotional response.

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Clint Hocking’s talks are always interesting, but this is a particularly fascinating one from the GDC 2011.

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I’m a local organiser for the Workshop on Algebra, Coalgebra and Topology (part of the Wessex Theory Seminar) which will be held at the University of Bath on March 1st 2013. More details on that page to which I just linked. Email me if you’d like to attend (registration is free). Proceedings will be published in ENTCS if enough people submit.

To my friends who have sleeve tattoos, gauged ears or drawn-on moustaches, please don’t take this seriously <3

Sources: here and here.

This makes me pretty happy. Mike Ando has created a real, working Myst linking book.

Well, actually it’s a Myst-playing PC inside a hollowed-out book identical to the original Myst book, but it’s still gorgeous.

I am a lifelong fan of Cyan Worlds’ Myst games, especially the first two. They occupy a special, formative part of my mind.

Something else which I am excited about, but which I have yet to fully investigate is Mystcraft, a Minecraft mod which allows players to create linking books and write descriptive books and use them to travel between worlds. That seems to rank among the best ideas.

This has been plaguing me for a while since I updated to Mac OS 10.8. Dragging layers in the layers palette of Photoshop CS4 would cause an immediate crash to desktop. Finally found a solution in this thread which worked.

Solution: turn off the OS power-saving graphics switching.

It’s the checkbox at the top of the Energy Saving preference pane:

You’ll need to ensure that it’s unchecked and probably restart after that.

Now I can drag layers all day long.

Since Braid, 2D indie puzzle platformers have had somewhat of a resurgence (to put it mildly). Typically with such a release, we expect the game to have some unique, mind-bending mechanic, sport either retro pixels or hand-drawn art, and to be “atmospheric”. Closure fits snugly into this paradigm. Going in, I was worried I’d be trudging through it, rapidly losing interest as the novelty wore off as has happened before with indie puzzlers. But this didn’t happen; Closure grabbed me and, through its excellently designed levels and well-crafted difficulty curve, lead me through to completion in just a few play sessions.

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What with the way the world is at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about social justice. I find myself confronted with sexism, homophobia, and even racism, with increasing frequency both offline and online. Possibly it’s just because I’m becoming more conscious of these things as I become more educated about the world, myself and the power dynamics therein. But even empirically it seems like the dark forces are massing.

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