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Molyneux’s Cube Contains Charity
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2 comments on Molyneux’s Cube Contains CharityPeter Molyneux is making a game called Curiosity: What’s Inside The Cube, in which players will be chipping away at a giant cube together in order to found out what’s inside; something “life-changing”, supposedly. Of course, you’ll be able to buy more expensive chisels and such to speed up how fast you can chip away,…
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What Retro Games Mean Today
What’s a retro game today? 8 bit pixellated graphics, chiptunes, simple platformer game mechanics, and charmingly traditional scoring and levelling? If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, that makes plenty of sense. I didn’t – I was born in 1982, so the most memorable games I played usually had at least EGA or…
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The Many Meanings of The Islanders
After reading Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, I was immediately compelled to figure out exactly what was going on in the story (similar to what I tried with Iain Banks’ Transition). Of course, The Islanders is even more deliberately ambiguous and dreamlike than Transition, and so I’m acutely aware that trying to unknot the plot is…
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Augmented Reality: Paleofuture in Action
This month’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine has an augmented reality feature in which you use a smartphone to ‘bring the cover to life’. It’s far from the first magazine to do it, and it’s hard to miss adverts on the tube or at bus stops that have some variation of ‘scan this advert to…
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Does it Scale?
When I first heard about Occupy Wall Street, I had two conflicting reactions: I was happy that the incredible rise in inequality and the pernicious influence of corporations and vested interests on democracy was finally getting the attention it deserved – but I found the sheer lack of organisation painful to see. In particular, the…
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Thoughts on consistency in tablet news apps
A few months ago, I finally had what I’d been dreaming of for years – digital delivery of every single magazine and newspaper I read. No more stacks of New Yorkers and Economists lingering on tables waiting to be given away (or more likely, recycled); no more hunting for all the bits of subscription forms…
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Slightly outdated thoughts on Siri
I wrote the following piece for the Telegraph a few hours before Steve Jobs’ death was announced, so unsurprisingly, it didn’t go up. And since it’s all about Siri – which is now released – it’s a bit out of date. But I thought you might be interested in seeing it anyway: This week, the…
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British Airways and Time-Travelling Commercials
British Airways unveiled their big new commercial recently, as part of their £20 million advertising campaign: It has a Downton Abbey/Mad Men retro vibe, mixed with a go-getting drive to the future; we’re meant to admire these brave ‘young men’ (as they’re always called – not ‘young people’ and certainly not ‘young women’) as they…
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On Reamde, Neal Stephenson, and The Mongoliad
I was disappointed. When I heard about Reamde‘s premise of hackers, spies, and gold mining in a massive multiplayer online game called T’Rain, I had the same worried feeling that I had when I heard about Anathem’s monasteries – that Neal Stephenson was venturing away from the sort of adventure/SF capers I enjoyed best. However,…
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Things I’m doing
Over the next few months, I’m going to be doing several conferences: TEDxSheffield on 22nd Sept Improving Reality in Brighton on 23rd Sept This Happened in London on 23rd Sept Over the Air in Bletchley Park on 30th Sept BAF Game in Bradford on 8th November There’d be three more if I weren’t going on…
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