Writing

Stuff that I have written.

A Theory of Fun website is back!

 Posted by (Visited 16269 times)  Art, Writing  Tagged with:
Nov 242011
 

After a bunch of painful adventures with domain registrars and WHOIS and other stuff, I am happy to say that the A Theory of Fun for Game Design book website is back.

In the process, I also modernized it — it’s all CSS fancy now, instead of using ancient Javascript stuff to make highlighting buttons. It’s got a fresh coat of paint on it, and actually looks like it was maybe made this century, maybe.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

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A Theory of Fun is now an eBook

 Posted by (Visited 14813 times)  Game talk, Writing  Tagged with:
Nov 302010
 

Cover of ATOfIt’s been a while since I had big news to post about the book! But here it is: A Theory of Fun is on Kindle finally. I am told that it took a while to do the Kindle conversion because of all of the images. It is also available in a variety of other formats at the O’Reilly online store.

I have seen a few odd glitches here and there in the Kindle version, things like the press quotes and reviews, but the book seems to have come through nicely, albeit with a few less penguins (the chapter header ones are gone). The cartoons are more like small illustrations inset into the text.

Amazon has it on sale for $9.99, so it’s definitely the cheapest way to get the book. Plus, you can send Kindle books as gifts now (nudge nudge). I probably earn more money if you get it from O’Reilly though. 🙂

Aug 082010
 

Boston Photographs

There is a street in Boston where the gas lamps have been burning
For a hundred forty years; where lamplighters no longer walk
The cycle of the twenty four, since globule mantles left to glow
Were cheaper than the labor spent in dimming gas in rain and snow.

The gravestones at the Granary are sunk in mud, or shattered sheets.
The midnight ride of Paul Revere is heaps of rocks, is piles
of pennies, and a rain soaked flag or two. The Burying Ground
is older still, and the thousands share five hundred weathered stones.

A Custom House is a hotel. A macaroni bursts in yellow sculpture
Beside a Market square. A Brutalist town hall juts jaws beside
Stark glass memorials and Boston’s oldest pub. They said, “You can’t
Hear city sounds from inside Boston Common!” but they lied.

Look! — homes upon a fisher wharf, held up by mussels and stout wood,
The Charles for a cellar door and a neighbor in a sloop.
With California earthquake eyes, the pilings underneath the wharf
That hold the condominiums high are trembling on the edge of hope.

We watch the tide; the rise, the fall, the six foot gap from tall to small.
The fixity of history, the folly of infinity, the way the town believes itself
The sailing ship, the catamaran, the hackneys and velocipedes,
The ferry, horses, cabs and cars, the moving van, and the rumbling T,

Four hundred years all held as close as simultaneity.
Mistaken hills hold monuments to battles fought elsewhere,
And staid New England poets paint their copperplated iambs
In pixels on a screen, declaiming beats from Faneuil Hall.

I cast these Boston photographs to what they once called ether,
Where they may last as long as tiny mantles glow.
They are the fixity of touristry, the river banks we made by hand,
Are monuments as long as networks grow, as long as human power flows;
Are structures standing strong upon the sand.

Asteroids, the movie

 Posted by (Visited 6733 times)  Watching, Writing
Jul 022009
 

Apparently, Candyland, Battleship, and Asteroids were optioned for movies. To my surprise, everyone focuses on Asteroids. “How can they make a movie of that??” People keep saying this but they’re wrong!

A motley crowd of ethnically diverse people thrown together by circumstance are traveling in a hermetically sealed spaceship with an incredibly valuable cargo. Inside it is dark, and sweaty, and clangy. The cargo must reach Earth before everyone there dies of the mysterious alien plague. The clock is ticking. Then — SABOTAGE! The ship falls out of hyperspace in the midst of a huge asteroid field, full of giant tumbling mountains, with deep dark crevices and deadly pockets of methane gas that spout forth in majestic geysers. They must jet and shoot to stay alive, and find fuel to get them back out. The ominous alien ships are circling, just waiting for them to make a mistake, and unbeknowst to them, one of the crew on board is a traitor to the human race…

Battleship, now, that movie will suck. 🙂