Re:Play 2012: Brand New, You're Retro

At the Re:Play conference, Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul spoke about platforms and distribution models from the Atari 2600 to Angry Birds. As interactive entertainment enter the mainstream, we see game design and business models changing and shifting focus away from the "hardcore gamer." The panelists discuss how this shift isn't exactly new, that casual games are a return to the simplicity of early platforms like the Atari 2600, fitting into the history of video games.

• Nick Montfort is the author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and Twisty Little Passages. Jesper Juul is the author of A Casual Revolution.
• Their "parenthesis" - Early games were easy, had short play sessions, and were for everybody.  The later hardcore games were hard, had esoteric conventions and massive time investments, and were for niche audiences. The casual games of the present have attributes of the early games.
• The audience watched an Atari 2600 commercial and a Wii commercial. Both commercials showcase inclusion, with the entire family participating in playing in the living room. The two guys traveling around America to promote the Wii are similar to Mormons, knocking on people's doors and evangelizing the console.
• At the advent of the video game industry, there was a headline in the newspaper that read, "New video games offer something for everyone." Reading this now, it seems like it's referring to specific new games, but it's actually talking about the video game medium as a whole.
• New video games always promoted visuals and HD graphics. They key word was always "more." The mid-2000s, however, brought casual games with Bejeweled, Diner Dash, and Rockband.
• Hardcore games were traditionally only sold in boxes and targeted at young males. They were promoted on better graphics and longer play sessions.
• The "hardcore gamer" stereotype involved a gamer who didn't sleep and had no social contacts. He just came home from work and played games right away. The "casual gamer" stereotype was someone who played for shorter term rewards of beauty and distraction, and played games to take a break.
• Casual design principles include positive fiction (grow a farm or build a city instead of fighting a war), high usability, interruptible gameplay (game saves for you at every action), low time commitment, and lenient punishments.
• High budget games need to sell so many copies to break even. A return to simpler games was inevitable with the raising costs of game development.
• An example of this is "ambient occlusive crease shading," a difficult to implement shading technique that has barely any apparent difference. Game technology is at a point of diminishing returns.
• There are "gamer genres" like casual, midcore, hardcore, pro, newbie, retro gamer, girl gamers, and gaymers. These are all stereotypes of a specific kind of gamer.
• The adventure genre was based on the game Adventure.
• Text adventures were the only adventure games back then, so the term "text adventure" didn't exist until graphic adventures were introduced. Calling them text adventures back then was like saying "black-and-white television" or "silent films" back when they were the only thing in existence with nothing to compare to.
• Is Pong a sports game? It was placed in the sports section on release.
• The "vidiot" was one of the earliest examples of an identified gamer genre. A vidiot was a game player and an excellent video player who plays as a way of life and for inner satisfaction.
• Kevin Flynn from Tron is a core example of a vidiot. Ironically, his son Sam from the sequel represented the image of a modern hardcore gamer.
• Angry Birds is a casual game that harkens back to Artillery and Gorillas.
• Atari 2600 had to be simplistic by necessity due to technical limitations. Current mobile games are also technically constraint by the mobile devices.
• Arcades were the genesis of the hardcore gamer. There is something special about showing off your skills to a crowd of other players. After games moved to home, that phenomenon moved to e-sports. Online has given players the facility to show off.
• Controls at arcades were extremely varied and before, it was very expensive for home consoles to do what arcades did.
• When did talking and writing about games as a profession become possible? Around the late 1990s, game conferences and academia spurred up. Video game studies appeared in English, media, computer science, and digital humanities departments.
• We have the computer science field, but where are the "computer arts?"
• Digipen and Fullsail are game development universities based on concrete development skills. There are also more abstract programs like at USC and NYU.

Re:Play 2012: Publisher Revolutions: Free-to-Play Economics

There is a fundamental shift taking place among the traditional value chain of the video game business. Developers, publishers, and retailers find themselves confronted with a changing market, forcing each of them to assume a different role. Joost van Dreunen (NYU Game Center) speaks with Stephen Ju (Credit Suisse), Gui Karyo (Atari), and Jessica Rovello (Arkadium) about major trends in the industry such as the move towards free-to-play and the emergence of social gaming.

Conversation with Joost van Dreunen

• "Companies that continue to rely on the old model as it changes before our eyes, unless they change their ways and invest in the future, those companies will eventually die off. No two ways about it." -- Peter Moore of EA
• "Global market for virtual goods will exceed $100 billion by the end of this decade." -- Trip Hawkins of Digital Chocolate
• There is a shift from the $60 retail box to $0.99 apps and the free-to-play model. The proliferation of Facebook and mobile has caused this trend. The audience is much larger and distribution is much higher on these platforms.
• Looking at a line graph depicting market value, Zynga is doing well above Activision and EA. THQ trails far behind and is about to be delisted.
• Is there a big difference between boxed retail and digital games' profit models? Jess says that the boxed retail model is not necessarily bad, nor are digital games irrevocably better. Digital games are still a very hit-driven industry. Digital distribution is not an amazing end-all panacea. For every one developer who released an app by himself and made $100,000, there are 300 other developers who tried the same thing and failed.
• Revenue models for casual/social games include advertisements and sponsorships, microtransactions, sometimes subscriptions but those are slower and more rare, and sometimes the purchase model.
• The company structure has to change to develop social games. In the case of Arkadium, the company had to shift thinking to a direct-to-consumer basis and build a games-as-service model. They added an analytics department because they needed to look at numbers and react to data at a minute-to-minute level. They added a monetization/revenue team whose job is to balance economies and think of ways to optimize user spending. The culture of the entire company changed to include thinking about numbers and metrics (ARPU, DAU/MAU, etc.)
• Core games business is still a good business, but there's just a bigger barrier of entry for developers.
• Majority of the revenue of a free-to-play game comes from certain players who pay a significant amount of money for items, much more than $60. The amounts they are willing to pay for can be shocking even to social/casual developers.
• Many social/casual games are not so different from gambling. DragonVale is basically two slot machines masked in a world with cute dragons. Many online games have inherent design elements of gambling.
• Getting the most out of a game relies on analytical data. You can make a mediocre game much better with the correct analytics. However, data won't make a bad game good, so it's still important to design a good game first.
• When your company makes a monumental shift from one audience to another, from one distribution platform to another, you must realize that it takes more time and money than you would expect it to. Large companies can often stumble when they make these shifts. "Once you make the decision to go there, you need to go there."
• Arkadium is not a first mover. They don't put all their eggs in one basket or go all in on one market. They see where the market is going first.
• EA and Zynga follow the innovation through acquisition model. EA bought Playfish and pretty much drove it down to the ground. They launched one game, Sims Social, but didn't release enough content afterwards to keep the audience engaged.
• Zynga was able to scale before "Facebook went down." But they also would acquire studios with any successful property such as OMGPop. They need to bring killer apps to their audience to keep them engaged.
• Talent is very important in game design, but sometimes, designers just need to luck out. OMGPop went through 5 iterations of Draw Something before it became a success.
• The difference between the web and mobile is everything. For Draw Something, drawing with the mouse wasn't fun, but with touch, it was intuitive, engaging, and attracted the audience that it has now.
• Angry Birds is a great merchandising and licensing property. It has great character designs in which the aesthetics lent itself easily to merchandising. The birds has simple shapes and were bright and colorful. They were very appealing to kids, who really drive the licensing business. The majority of licensing is in things for kids like shirts, toys, bed sheets, pajamas, etc.
• Merchandising broadens your IP with consumers, but it's hard. It's like buying two lottery tickets instead of one. You need to have IP that is merchandisable.
• There are companies now that specialize in merchandising to very narrow niches. For example, they would make a jacket from Resident Evil and sell it for $1,000. Their revenue model revolves around small volume of sales, but high dollar amount per sale.
• Casual games are aimed at the common denominator. Is it worth moving this to a niche audience? Generally, no. Only a small percentage of the audience (1-8%) monetizes, so you really need a big audience to make money.
• In many cases, games are not reinventing the wheel. Zynga's 'ville games are just SimCity, Draw Something is Pictionary, Words With Friends is Scrabble. It is difficult to bring consumers interesting and exciting ideas, which is a problem that the industry is currently facing.
• Discoverability of your game is everything. An app developer without a contact at Apple to get their game featured at the AppStore is like a retail box developer without a deal with Walmart to have their game on their shelves. There is little chance of success if you're not featured in the AppStore.
• How do you move from games-as-product to games-as-service model? Games-as-service was a model pioneered in Korea by Nexon, mostly as a counterbalance to the piracy in Asia. They treat game content as episodic and it is a more involved process than the traditional model.

Question and Answer

• What do you do with non-paying users? Free users are costly since they take up server space or network capacity. Make them watch a video ad and make the money back from advertisement. The ad model can be difficult because you need a big enough audience to make money. You also need to put ads early in the game rather than later. Users would complain if they suddenly started getting ads after being used to not seeing them. You may also leverage these users for virality.
• Is Kickstarter changing the rules of publishing games? What impact will it have on the development ecosystem? For Kickstarter campaigns to be successful, it needs studios that have a pre-existing install base like Double Fine or games with an avid fanbase like Wasteland. The Kickstarter craze is an interesting phenomenon, but it won't overturn the traditional publisher model. In addition, none of these funded game have come to market yet. Will they actually be good games? Will the developers be able to deliver on their promise? The role of the publisher is to make sure the developers are able to meet the promises to the consumers.
• What are sponsorships? For the Facebook version of Cooking Mama, Ragu approached Arkadium about using the brand for one of its minigames. It made sense for a food-based brand to be incorporated into a food-based game. Good advertisement is not evil.
• Some players, who are completely opposed to ever paying for the game, are not so offended by taking 30 seconds to watch a video ad and getting something out of it.
• Would there be any more cases like thatgamecompany and their three-game deal with Sony? Publishers run on risk-based management. If presented with a unorthodox game idea like Spore, they need an established successful team to counter balance the risk in the game design like Will Wright's team. Publishers like 6waves make deals where they take a percentage cut for games that are already almost finished and they don't have to fund development. To make a publishing deal for development, you need to have a good track record of making money.

Re:Play 2012: Video Games and Religion

Kicking off the first annual Re:Play conference, Leil Leibovitz of NYU interviewed Ryan Hennesy of Princeton and rabbi Micah Kelber about the relationship between video games and religion. Video games are often seen as a waste of time at best, or at worst, as a corruptor of young souls. But games and religions have more in common than what people might imagine as they are both closed systems based on stringent rules and dedicated largely to ritual. The panel discusses these two forms of personal reflection and communal interaction and examined what they might have to teach each other.


Conversation with Leil Leibovitz

• Leil starts, "I'm a few cheeseburgers removed from the faith of my fathers."
• He continues, "It's ten in the morning at a video game conference, so naturally, we're going to talk about the Holocaust."
• Rabbi Micah Kelber has been recently fascinated with Call of Duty: World at War. He comes from a background of reading black and white scripture, then he was introduced to the vivid colors and storytelling of comic books, which led him to find video games as a medium of engagement.
• Call of Duty allows him to virtually fight the war of his fathers and understand the American contribution to the war. He's always had haunting dreams about the Holocaust, but they stopped after he overcame the dreams in game. It's embarrassing for him to say that in the world of Call of Duty, he wants the war to never stop as killing the demons satisfied him.
• Ryan Hennesy grew up with a narrow and limited experience of what religion and spiritualism are. He was interested in the relationship between religion and games, as many religious terms like "death," "resurrection," and "reincarnation" exist in the game space.
• There are quite confusing, profound theological feelings in games. Games are environments where you have some sort of free will within a system of rules designed by someone far away you'll never meet. There are restrictions in the world such as science, physics, and social contexts. Goals in games are predetermined and follow a model that represents our free will on Earth. There are many analogies between reality and games to draw from.
• In God of War 2, there is a scene that required a human sacrifice. It conflicted against Micah's own personal beliefs, but he was left no other choice but to comply in order to progress in the game. As a player, Micah realized that free will was curtailed in the game. He points out there are these kinds of limitations in the game that don't necessarily exist in real-life.
• The panel see games as an examination of oneself. Video games draw us to a moment of ecstatic transcendence and flow.
• However, no matter how immersive the game can be, there is usually an element of detachment from the games. Micah mentions that in Call of Duty, there is a level where the player enters a library to kill some Nazis. As a player, Micah was curious about the books found in this library and was drawn to examine them, removing himself from the game experience.
• Games are arts of participation such that there's no other option but to impact us. Players see avatars as extensions of themselves.
• There is no clear way to distinguish religion from culture. You can see Eastern spirituality in games like Final Fantasy from the character interactions with spiritual beings.
• The difference of how Eastern and Western cultures view religion is demonstrated by Blue Dragon (a JRPG) and Dragon Age (a WRPG). In Dragon Age, there exists a church in the game that you can fight or join. In Blue Dragon, there is no such thing as a church, but there are these spiritual beings that the characters are joined with. In the West, the idea of religion is tied to a body that can either be benevolent or antagonistic. In the East, however, religion is just ingrained into everyone; it is a part of people's lives.
• Concerning death and reincarnation, the concept of death becomes easier and easier to every generation. Death in games almost trivialize death. Maybe someone should make a game where you only have one life and the game explodes when you die.
• Likewise, terminology like "I died" or "I killed that person" makes death seem meaningless. Ryan attributes this to a poverty of language.
• Game developers, while sometimes respecting religion, ignore the significance of death. In Assassin's Creed, for example, the developers were very careful to not let the player ever destroy or burn Holy books in the game, yet the entire game is based on assassination and killing.
• Sniper 2 is a game featuring extraordinary death sequences and vivid killings (ie. you can see the close up of a bullet flying through a victim's liver). However, the more vivid the killings are, the less realistic they are also.
• Members of clergy see themselves as shepherd and the job of a shepherd is to prevent sheep from getting eaten. They want to protect and shield the public from the evil they deem video games as. Often, they see games as dangerous as reactions to Columbine and similar events.
• But as more people begin to accept that games are art, they can convince the public that games are not from the devil. Many people's view of games are from their last impressions of them. When they stop playing games at age 13, their understanding of the medium is what it was at age 13. They won't understand the complexities of what games have to offer. Similarly, when people stop going to church at age 13, their views of religion remain at that juvenile comprehension.
• Games enabled both Ryan and Micah to be better religious persons. For Micah, games allows him to fight his demons and also better understand some religious concepts such as different worlds.

Question and Answer

• Do they consider games as texts to be read? It is good to treat games more like texts. Right now is an interesting point in history because there's a 50/50 divide between people who know what video games are and those who don't. That won't be true anymore in 50 years. This is the time to start evangelizing games as texts.
• What can we learn from games about religion? Players can learn there are multiple paths in life. Games like World of Warcraft was so successful in part because it gave players the option to play how they want. If they don't want to go out killing monsters, they can play a smith and make weaponry or a priest who heals people. Paths of life is an important concept that religions try to teach.
• Many of the games that were mentioned in the talk like Call of Duty, God of War, and Blue Dragon conveyed religious ideas through narrative. But is it possible to get religious experiences from abstract games like Tetris or even Tecmo Bowl? The brainwave activity of someone during religious experiences is exactly the same as when Apple fanboys talk about a new Apple product. Likewise, in the physical sense of religious experience, people enter that state when playing games of physical dexterity that disengages their minds such as Tetris.
• How do you avoid getting too preachy when designing a game with a central message? Micah says that he would like to design a game where players can contribute to a persistent world. Players would participate in an act of benevolence without necessarily being told to. For Ryan, he pushes back on the idea that getting too preachy is a bad thing. It is a great thing about the arts to be vocal and preachy about your ideas, and starting a dialogue with the audience.
• Death is trivialized because it's repeatable, but what about creation? Micah says the most important experience of games for him is the co-creation of a world, liken to God and man's activities in Genesis. God created the world and its inhabitants, but man named all the animals and objects.
• Early in Assassin's Creed, Altair burns the body of a victim because he couldn't bear leaving the body in disrespect. Later in the game, however, his wife dies and he leaves her body behind. Micah, as a player, didn't want to leave her body behind but the game forces him to. There is an inconsistency in the game that made him appreciate the consistency of the real world.
• God games provide good religious comprehension as it's important to think from God's side. Sympathizing with God is one important message of Christianity. As a player, you feel frustrated when citizens in your game don't do what you tell them to do, which lets you understand God's feelings. Games like Sid Meier's Civilization and other RTS's, although wrapped in a political or military context, really let you play as God implicitly.

Doing Ridiculous Shit With Technology

Douglas Wilson, a PhD student at IT University of Copenhagen's Center for Computer Games Research, gave a talk about his work, his inspiration from folk games, and his creative uses of technology. During the roundtable discussion, the attendees debated on topics of rhetoric vs. design and creating art vs. making money.

Presentation

• Douglas's mission statement: Games that are confrontational, silly, broken, or incomplete can shift the focus of games from winning to a more festive, co-dependent, and performative play.
• His sources of philosophical inspiration include Hannah Arendt, Dave Hickey, Bill Gaver, Grant Kester, Chantal Mouffe, Bernie DeKoven, Paul Dourish, and Richard Schechner.
• The games he created include Dark Room Sex Games, B.U.T.T.O.N., Johann Sebastian Joust, and the in-progress Mutazione.
• During a summer when the Playstation Move controller was on his mind, he created Dog the Wag. In this game, players tie a Move controller to their butts and get on all fours. The more they shake their butts and effectively "wag their tails," the more points they get. Sometimes, a player's controller will flash, making him vulnerable and causing the other players to tackle him to eliminate him from the game.
• Folk games are physical party games, many of unknown origin. An example of a folk game is one where players tie a string to their butt and tie a rock to the other end of the string. They run through an obstacle course while trying to knock objects with the rock.
• His first attempt at a motion game was inspired by Street Fighter. He created a 2-player fighting game where the fighters would perform fantastic moves based on the players' movements. However, this game didn't work out and ultimately failed. He realized that using traditional games as a precedence for motion games was leading him down the wrong path, so he turned to folk games for inspiration.
• Folk games are defined as traditional, ethnic, or indigenous sports or games. Folk games often are simple in design, use common equipment, spread by word of mouth, are open to house rules, physical, and deliberately silly. Folk games are an attitude. They are egalitarian.
• Ninja is a theatrical, turn-based folk game where people perform ninja poses and try to slap each other's hands.
• There is a distinction between modern sports and popular sports. A modern sport is a ritual of perfect achievement where athletes set records (ie. Olympics, NBA, NFL, etc.). A popular sport, however, is festive and not serious. Anyone can get involved and there is a joy of subversion.
• For example, in Dog the Wag, tying a controller to your butt exhibits the joy of subversion. No matter what the game is, you are already having fun.
• Beacons of Hope is an installation game designed by Douglas. It is played with 20 people in a completely dark room. Two of the players are monsters who must try to catch all the human players and eliminate them from the game. The human players have to find three Move controllers in the dark (representing beacons) and simultaneously turn on all three beacons at the same time to win the game. This game is a direct ripoff of an old camp game.
• MegaGIRP is another installation game designed by Douglas, based on an existing web game called GIRP. MegaGIRP uses four Dance Dance Revolution pads instead of a keyboard, so instead of being a "Twister for your fingers," it becomes actual Twister. The game isn't so much like mountain climbing, but it's definitely a taxing and annoying physical exercise that's ultimately fun. The obvious inspiration for this game was Twister.
• Johann Sebastian Joust was inspired by two separate folk games. The first was the game of chicken played on a tight rope. Two players start on opposite sides of a tight rope and their objective is to get to the other side while pushing the other player off the tight rope. The second point of inspiration was a folk game where two blindfolded players carry a small fruit with spoons. The first person to hit the other wins or whoever drops the fruit first loses. This gave him the idea that a slow motion physical game is incredibly fun. Lemon Jousting, a very similar game to the second folk game, was unbeknownst to Douglas when he worked on Johann Sebastian Joust.
• Monkey See, Monkey Mime was a game about mimicking.
• Edgar Rice Frotteur was a game jam project where he hung 20 Move controllers on the ceiling and created a jungle gym game.
• In the marketing for the Move controller, the slogan was "This changes everything." There is an iconic image of Kevin Butler holding two Move controllers and projecting a bow and arrow. Sony wants to get across the idea that you can do anything with the Move, but this is not true in reality. Douglas thinks it's better to embrace technological limitations than to fight it.
• As an indie developer, your best option is to embrace your constraints. For example, accelerometers are terrible and instead of making a game heavily based on the nuances of movement, he designed games that are essentially binary. You are either moving it or not.
• In the same note, he realized that he doesn't have to let the technology enforce all the rules of the game. He "deputizes" the player, letting them enforce the rules themselves. In B.U.T.T.O.N., the game doesn't know if the players take ten steps back or spin around in a circle when told, but the players have to enforce these rules among themselves or else the game is not fun. Likewise, in Johann Sebastian Joust, the game doesn't know if they players are standing within the circle or not.
• There is an aesthetic beauty in imperfection. His games let players to act the fool, to have "half-baked fun." He considers motion control as slapstick comedy. Many of his games don't need a screen because it's fun to just watch the players.
• He considers Wario Ware: Smooth Moves by far the best game on the Wii. It is a game that embraces the limitations of the Wii remote and institutes a carnivalesque environment.
• Frobisher Says is a PS Vita game not yet released in the US. It uses all of the Vita's technology. It includes a minigame called Look Away where the player loses if the Vita's camera ever tracks the white of the player's eyes, so the player plays the game without ever even looking at the screen.
• Fingle for the iPad is like Twister for your fingers. It cased in 70/80s sexual innuendo and makes players feel uncomfortable as their fingers cross into awkward positions.
• How does technology improve games? Douglas thinks this is the wrong question to ask and almost offensive to think about. The real question he wants to answer is, How can games improve technology?

Question and Answer

• Ninja didn't inspire Johann Sebastian Joust. But both games provide good public spectacle and Ninja is a good reference point.
• What are the social settings for his games? People wouldn't play Dog the Wag unless they are crazy or completely drunk at a party. It would be interesting to play his games at a non-traditional setting for party games such as a cathedral. Game studies often ignore the social contexts of games. As a designer, it's useful to think of social environments pragmatically.
• He looks at the last 50 years of contemporary, theater, and performance art as inspiration for his games. He wants to move away from the "banking model of art" where artists deposit meaning into objects and audiences withdraw meaning from the objects.
• Dog the Wag can be a violent game. It is something you don't want to play with strangers. This doesn't mean that all physical games of this nature are dangerous, but they need moderation on their brutality.
• Family picnic games were created as ice breakers and a general way to prevent the family from fighting each other. But these games and camp games can be brutal and violent. Dodgeball is historically brutal. It is up to the players to set the tone of the game.
• Frank Lantz mentions there is tension between Douglas's aggression against winning/losing as stated in his mission statement and the fact that all of his works clearly involves winning/losing. Douglas claims that his games, in a way, are parodies of winning/losing. They are games where players need to modulate themselves. In B.U.T.T.O.N., for example, players can easily win if they never take any steps back, don't follow instructions, and act violently, but the game wouldn't be fun at all.
• Frank is annoyed by creators having contradictory rhetoric and work. This can be attributed to the fact that many creators often have to take exaggerated rhetorical stances to defend their art. "Everything is an overcorrection." Meanwhile, writers like strong quotes to provoke people.
• For Douglas, as a designer, it useful to have a strong rhetoric as a framework for design. But according to Eric Zimmerman, the danger of overcorrection is that you become less flexible as a designer.
• Brenda Brathwaite has stated "mechanic is the message" and "rules are everything." These have been responses to the over Hollywood-ification of the industry. Don't confuse cutscenes and narrative as the game itself. This is a very strong rhetorical stance that she has taken, though it may be the case that she doesn't think it's necessarily true. Frank criticizes Ian Bogost and Miguel Sicart for being guilty of this.
• Douglas thinks Proteus is the best game of the last decade.
• Douglas claims that "Braid is a shitty game because Jonathan Blow doesn't take writing seriously." Some of the NYU faculty thinks that Blow does take writing seriously; he's just a bad wrtier.
• How do you balance being a creator of art and a creator of commercial products? Definitely a challenge. There are many new venues celebrating indie and art games such as Babycastles, Wild  Rumpus in London, Kill Screen, No Quarter, and Gamma. There are also some organizations supporting the creation of art games like Eyebeam.
• Terry Cavanagh is a creator who made a lot of money from VVVVVV. Now he is working on ChatChat, a game about cats talking to other cats, even though this game would probably not make him any money. It's important for creative designers to be able to work on their passionate projects, but also something else to pay the bills.
• Another example is Zach Gage who makes commercial games like Spelltower, but also does a lot of weird art pieces.
• What about ludic forms in the art world? There are many great contemporary ludic art pieces such as Carsten Höller's Slide at the New Museum or Oliver Herring's TASK Parties. There is also the Fluxus art movement. Meanwhile, there are many games that are invading the art space such as the exhibitions at MOMA and the Smithsonian.
• Why does Douglas use commodity hardware like the PS Move controller and DDR pads? As an indie game developer, he needs peers to test his games and needs easy distribution. Having self-created tech is not reliable and there is no way to easily move his tech around. He always finds a nice aesthetic in the subversion of commodity hardware (ie. using these expensive, high-tech PS Move controllers and strapping it to people's behinds).
• Katherine Isbister mentions there is a weird feedback loop where engineers make things based on science fiction, which in turn is written by people who don't understand technology. 

TYWKIWDBI's Best Blogs of 2012

TYWKIWDBI ("Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently") is one of the most informative and interesting blogs on the web, and consequently one of my favorites. I'm proud to be listed as one of their best blogs of 2012, although it wasn't hard. Please subscribe to this blog if you haven't yet already!

http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/04/best-blogs-of-2012.html