The kind of thinking that makes you appreciate a company's work: clarity of design, whilst understanding themselves as part of an ecosystem (as opposed to: wanting to be your everything). I really like Valhalla's products.

Nice writeup of "press forward" tracks in Trackmania from Robert Yang. I knew about the genre, but hadn't twigged that the key to its existence was that Trackmania's physics are deterministic. Which of course, makes sense, now I think of it.

Wonderful article from an architect who worked on "The Witness" about the role of architecture practice in game design, and all the rough edges architects see within game worlds. Good on spatial design principles, too.

Newspaper Club is a great product - but I'm really glad Tom's written about the technical underpinnings of the latest version of the code, because it's super impressive. They threw out InDesign and replaced it with their own renderer, written in Cocoa; they have a gorgeous, rich Javascript client that's a joy to use; and they have a development team of 2. TWO. Brilliant work, folks.

",,,he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself." Spectacular photography; what a building.

Really interesting post about the architecture at Tumblr, which has changed a lot over the past few years, and is a fascinating selection of tools stacked together. Especially good on the reasoning behind tool selection.

"Yes, we could have started with the placeholder structures and made them more elaborate and better-looking, in a general video-game-level-design way, but that’s different from having well-thought-out ideas subtly embodied in the structures of the areas, which is what we are going for." The Witness used real architecture and landscape architecture firms to help design its world.

Lovely little round-up of games about architecture and the urban environment from Kars.

Gosh, what a lot of topics: fashion, fabrics, architecture, space, cybernetics, cities, all spinning out of the development of the spacesuit. Cracking interview, impossible to pick a quotation from.

" A physical model of Eindhoven rolled onto a drum and attached to a piano. A form of player piano with the city as the score." Just beautiful.

"We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help." Maciej on what Scaling Pinboard Fast actually looked like. Some good anecdotes in here.

"Books become clouds, raining events and built forms onto the city." This is marvellous

Trap streets - yes, of course. But trap rooms; trap architectures? That's iiinteresting.

"The optical future of architectural ornament: light with content.

That is, you get home with your digital camera and you click back through to see what you've photographed—and there are words, shapes, and objects hovering there in the street, or inside the buildings you once stood within, visual data only revealed through long-exposures." Brilliant.

"Nolan’s cities are iconless places. The Hong Kong sequence in The Dark Knight omits the harbour, the HSBC and Bank of China buildings, and that city’s famous apartment buildings, instead focussing on vertiginous aerial view of the masses of anonymous buildings in Central. Cobb and Mal’s ideal city four dreams deep in Inception is an infinity of curtain walled downtown, ordinary in the extreme and all the more unsettling because of it. In any case it will be interesting to see where Nolan takes Gotham city in its third outing, likely deeper into the fantastic generic." Interesting take on Christopher Nolan's nowhere-cities. Worth also noting that whilst Cobb and Ariadne build cities, Arthur's dreams tend towards interzones - airports and hotels. There's something on the Interzone and its relationship to that film to be said, too.

"The route of the [Metropolitan] line between Paddington and Bayswater (opened in 1868) necessitated the demolition of 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, situated on a long, upmarket terrace of five story houses, and it was decided to build a 5ft-thick facade which matched the houses either side of the break."

Back in 2006, early on a Saturday morning, artist Julien Berthier installed a new door in the city of Paris—but it was a fake door, leading nowhere, on an otherwise empty wall in the 3rd arrondissement... Unbelievably, Berthier adds, "Almost 4 years later, the address still exists. Regularly graffitied it is even cleaned by the city service.”

"There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle - this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time." Interview with the creator of Magnasanti. (If you've not seen the video, check it out; it is a SimCity obsession beyond belief).

"An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years. The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway." Wow. Via BLDGBLOG

"Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?" Marvellous, marvellous article, citing that Weizman piece I always end up citing, and looking how John McClane traverses the Nakatomi Plaza tower not through its corridors and elevators, but by literally infesting it.

"Landscaping overgrows, walls develop mildew, ceilings cave in—a building can be shut down, but that doesn’t make it go away. Brian Ulrich’s photographs of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores reveal the potential ghost towns lying inside successful shopping complexes all across America." Wonderful pictures; striking, strange, and sad all at once. And: all a little bit "Dead Center".

"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all."

"On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter." Some excellent stuff from Bryan Boyer.

"So here's my theory: WoW doesn't resemble a film. It resembles, rather, a medieval cathedral. And a magnificent one: it is the Chartres of the video-game world. Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion; indeed, since WoW is in a state of permanent expansion, it may not ever be "complete". All those programmers are the modern-day equivalent of stonemasons, foundation-diggers and structural engineers."

"Designed by London architect Julian Hakes, the Mojito shoe is made of carbon fiber—to give it strength and spring—and laminated with rubber on the bottom and leather—from furniture manufacturers in High Wycombe, England—on top." Gorgeous.

"Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender."

"So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It's a little bit collapsist; let's wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls - I'd love to see what we'd come up with then."

"FuckYeahSubways is a tumblelog." And it does exactly what it says on the tin: pictures of subways and metro systems, inside and out, from around the world. Really good.

"Ah - The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there's ever been." Jones on future cities, collating and refining thoughts into a lovely piece of structure and rhetoric. Also, the sentence "wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit".

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

"In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day." Woah.

"While creepily capitalist in its language, the scholarship within it is sound – echoing theories that Jacobs, Alexander others presented decades ago. What’s more – it contains a lot of the same arguments for iterative design that you see in traditional game design tomes. (For a special treat – try replacing the phrases like “destination” and “retail” with “MMO” and “boxed-game”)"

"During the Develop conference earlier this week, Edge Online editor Alex Wiltshire chaired a panel discussion on the close relationship between architecture and videogames, and here we have a recording of the full session for you to download." I still have to write it up, but it was really, really good. Worth a listen.

This session was genuinely excellent, and I'm probably going to write about it in the near future. In the meantime: bookmarked.

"The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story." Yes. Similarly: what you don't see is the decision-making, everything that was thrown away.

"...halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan. Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first." There is no way this wouldn't be awesome. And: a great write-up from Geoff.

"The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced today that The LEGO Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright Collection® LEGO Architecture sets." Hmn. Not sure what the market for these is, beyond curios; they're not particularly high-resolution, for starters.

On Shadow of the Colossus: "When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is _all_ you can do. Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar." Rossignol hits up BLDGBLOG, and (as if you couldn't have guessed), it's good.

This is epic and brilliant and has so many jumping-off points I need to read it again, and again, and again.

So I'm going to be writing the odd thing for Offworld from time to time, and this is my first post, on a nice post from Steve Gaynor about architecutre, and leading players through stories with architecture alone. More to come, pop-pickers.

James Box on interaction design as behavioural modifier. I really enjoyed this - mainly for its thoughts on architecture, branding, marketing, copywriting, rather than just on pure IXD. Some interesting products in there, too. Worth another look.

"...the Wii’s software stack is designed with little to no future proofing. There are basically zero provisions for any future updates; even obvious things like new storage devices or game patches. What’s worse is that this will affect the compatibility mode of any future Wii successor." Interesting analysis of what's going on inside a Wii, even if the architecture is a little limited.

"Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city." Yes; my favourite thing in that film was the growth of the city around Jamal, Bombay becoming Mumbai, and the skyscrapers growing.

"After being seen as cheap or low-rent housing for much of the 40s, asylums started to be seen as 21st century modern, and desirable places to live." All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. Heathcote's Lyddle End entry is fantastic, and primarily for his writing/futurism.

"Goaded by Mike Kuniavsky’s publication last week of an outline to his forthcoming book, here’s a table of contents for The City Is Here For You To Use. It’s a little unusual, in that it takes the form of a skeletal argument, or maybe even an essay; I hope you enjoy it."

"Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it – only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle."

"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of." More on this topic from Jones; still think there's something we're not quite hitting yet, but it's all good stuff.

"Steve Rose notes that the recent films have seen Bond visit and destroy as much villain-architecture as ever ("The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He's basically an enemy of architecture"), and suggests this can be traced back to Fleming's difficulties with Modernist architects." Rod on Bond is always good, and bonus points for the punning title.

"A series looking at different aspects of guardian.co.uk's rebuild and redesign project, which ran from October 2005 to September 2008." Looks like there's going to be some good stuff emerging from this; great to see the Guardian making it so public.

"I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user [...], I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library." Some lovely work by Dan Hill.

"[The modern supervillain's] hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile phone.... for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam employed to support character and storytelling." The network as fortress and ideology all at once.

"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.

"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."

"you make a labyrinth of well-placed incisions and the city is yours. Perforated from below by robbers, it rips to pieces. The city is a maze of unrealized break-ins."

"Dominating the skyline of Arkhangelsk, a city in Russia's far north-west, it is believed to be the world's tallest wooden house, soaring 13 floors to reach 144ft - about half the size of the tower of Big Ben." Wow.

"The other day I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if that pattern were wrapped up as a present for me (and others) to use? The answer is yes and it is named HTTParty." This is total awesome. Now I want to do more webservices hacks.

Oh my. Slides from Ludicorp's presentation in which they launched Flickr at ETech 2004. So much that's still so relevant, still not always understood. Wish I could just throw this at people at Develop instead of my talk.

"The bottom line is, there are laws on the books in the EU that stand in direct conflict with the needs of Google's architecture, and no amount of hand waving will make that fact go away." Smart artcile about the legal issues of cloud computing.

"...that's really the purpose of a web-based content creation interface—accepting something as quickly as possible to make the user happy enough to continue submitting more." Leslie Orchard on message-queue-based design.

"The city goes dark. The tolling gets louder. In all the region's cemeteries, the soil starts to quake." Oh god yes. Lovely article about earthquake dampers and giant clocks.

"If you are going to build a RESTful API, do it right. Your developers will thank you for it." Dare is right; the Newsgator REST API is very lacking, to say the least. When I used it, it even missed documented functionality.

I am amazed that anyone would have the patience to respond to Mike Arrington's general arsery, but it seem the Twitter team do. They are better men and women than I.

"We take interesting or representative elements and create something new from them. It's about taking inspiration from real places and producing something that captures the essence of it." Interview with Rockstar's art director on building cities.

"For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers"... pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s." Awesome

"I'm willing to accept that the API as a model for architecture contributes less to the design of individual buildings than to the function of the city, but it should effect both." Some good stuff in here I need to go back over.

"Sketching is not only practical but essential. It is the quickest, most accessible way to find out if a space, a vista, a progression can work and also to communicate it to others."

Vitruvius is most famous for asserting in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas - that is, it must be strong or durable, useful, and beautiful.

"We've been using the same tired metaphors for decades and they are not serving us well. What there was to learn from them was absorbed long ago." Eric Evans debunks metaphors for development.

"I suspect designing for the Web instead of around it is at least as important as language choice."

"I thought I would write a little about how the places and spaces that were familiar to us had begun to warp and twist in entirely new ways, and how I experienced new, unfamiliar places as a result of the birth."

"I've found instead that there is a formulaic way to produce excellent Controller code--the Controller Formula".

Not every social software system has all of these, but most of them have three or more. And the most popular social websites implement many of these building blocks, but focus on just one or two.

"I think there's a lot of merit in following a CRUD-based model for interacting with your application's resources. I'm not convinced all the hassle of bending dumb browser interactions into a REST-based set of verbs..."

"Cologne was built by Charlemagne – but Cologne has the shape that it does today because of the abilities and non-abilities of a Lancaster Bomber." Phenomenal interview. Worth savouring every word.

"The map is an idealisation, a beautiful illusion of symmetry and grace. It gives form and order to the formless and disordered appearance of the capital." - Peter Ackroyd in the New Statesman, on the exhibition of London's Maps at the BL.

"I trust that the guys who wrote this have been shot. It’s not even internally consistent. And what’s with all this HTTP GET bindings. I thought GET was undefined."

Awesome selection of tips, and some new plugins I'd not heard of. Lots to take stock off.