"THIS LITTLE WAY SHAKESPEARE ESCALATING THE STAKES AND POSITIONING THE ENDGAME = THE SAME EXACT WAY HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITERS HANDLE THE ENTIRE MIDDLE PARTS OF THEIR GODDAMN MOVIE.

NO WONDER THEY AIMLESS AND BORING." Film Crit Hulk is brilliant.

"His earliest revelation about how the TV medium worked—one that heavily influences Community—came courtesy of a Cheers board game he spotted at a toy store. He realized that the characters were so relatable and their dynamics so clearly defined that anyone could step into their lives—even in a board game." Brilliant interview with Dan Harmon - but this paragraph really leapt out at me.

"In recent years we've seen plenty of criticism (including mine) leveled at video games that rehash old ideas; games that rely on genre formulas; games that ape the language of film. Games, we're often told, need new ideas. Games need to grow up. Games should leverage their defining interactivity. Cutscenes are lazy. Let movies be movies. Players want to write their own stories. Games don't need authored narratives. Games don't need linear stories. Games don't need stories. All games should be fun. No they shouldn't.

The problem with these reductive arguments is they fail to account for how art rails against boundaries; how artists inevitably seek to situate their work in the margins no one can own. Artists instinctively push back against "don't," "shouldn't," and "must." This is why we give them genius grants. It's also why we put them in prison. The real action is in the margins." Good stuff from Michael.

"An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply." Oh. That's an interesting way of looking at it.

This is both good and bad in places; I'm not totally convinced by the "What would players rather shoot -- a wall, or a Nazi?" argument, but I'm very interested (as per my previous writing on Far Cry 2) in notions of non-player characters as protagonist; the player as lens through which story emerges, rather than hero of said story. Stuff to think on, for sure, but I'm still working out how to respond to this; I'm not sure it fulfils its goal of discussing "how writers and designers can collaborate smoothly and successfully"; it just shows me some examples.

"MGS4 is the game that contains everything Hideo Kojima knows about game design and storytelling - and that is precisely what's so thrillingly right and so damnably wrong with it. Faced with a myriad of choices [...] Kojima chose not to choose. "

"when a technical wife and a design husband love each other very much they have a special meeting and nine months later a website is born." Great quotation; fantastic writeup of what sounded like a fantastic talk. It captures how I feel almost perfectly.

"If there’s a single piece of functionality that you feel you can’t provide in raw HTML, you’re doing it wrong." Yes. Steve is, by and large, right about all of this. This is why front-end development is worthy of being a role in its own right.

A perceptive and detailed analysis of the Dunbar Number - and why some of the hype around it is misguided.

"I am an information architect because I care about the structure of information and building things from that structure"

Nice IA piece from boxesandarrow