There’s a nice (if somewhat belated!) review of A Theory of Fun from an interactive fiction perspective at Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction blog. Kind of interesting, because of course a lot of IF focuses on puzzles, and a lot of IF focuses on narrative, and the book doesn’t have too much to say about either. 🙂
Peacemaker is out. For those who haven’t been following this serious game effort, it’s a title where you take the role of PM of either Israel or the Palestine Authority and attempt to make everyone happy enough to bring about lasting peace.
There are two good articles on it already: Ernest Adamds at Gamasutra and Sott Jennings at Broken Toys. Different takes, and they reference different classic games: Balance of Power versus Hidden Agenda.
The fact that we only have three significant games in this genre in 17 years is a little depressing.
I probably need to get this guitar-based music toy for the Nintendo DS. Press a direction on the DPad to reach different chords, and strum with the stylus. It’s an import only, but it’s not region-locked…
The default chord layout is missing the B and Bm chords. What’s up with that? No way to blues in E by default!
Here’s some videos of it:
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Nick Koranda kindly provided the MUD-Dev2 list with a full copy of the original MUD-Dev mailing list archive — 31,406 messages, 62 megabytes as a zip.
Edit: it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters. MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design — which was, of course mostly MUDs, but folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well. Many of the snippets on the site come from there, and combing through these very archives was the source of the original Laws of Online World Design. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom there.
You can get it from me here: Compleat MUD-Dev archive (62MB zip)
Or from Nick at: http://mkhh.net/MUD-Archive.zip
Edit: also mirrored now here.
For giggles, here’s the first, last, and median messages:
As many of you have noticed, the site is periodically (as in, multiple times a day!) becoming unavailable with an “account suspended” message. So here’s the status:
A while back, apparently, my host put a tighter CPU limit on me because the site was getting so popular it was affecting other sites on the same server. You would not be alone in thinking this an odd way to handle the situation: “Hmm, this site is pushing at the limits of its allotment. So let’s decrease it.” They of course neglected to tell me that they did this. In fact, they neglected to even note it in my account, so all subsequent support folks have been baffled. Kudos to support guy Jamie for working to figure out the problem. Unfortunately, it’s still not fixed.
