So here’s my N7 Nerf Maverick, my first NERF mod/paintjob but probably not my last:

Oddly enough, the rise of the nerds ™ has become so hilariously mainstream, that the coolest character in a super hero movie are the nerds. Nice to see, considering I self-identify as a nerd. I am wondering though if nerds no longer glorify “jocks” but instead “nerds”. It’s not just about the Hulk, it’s a lot about Banner being a scientist. Regardless of my musings: the movie is indeed as awesome as people say so go watch it. Quick before the heavy meme-ification of the movie spoils you.

Link: “Remove a letter from a Game” Game
Originally found on Reddit by a buddy of mine, the original inspiration dealt with movies. The idea is to remove a letter from the title and use the remaining to come up with a new concept. Obviously hilarious. We spent some time coming up with great ideas of our own, and some of them being interesting on their own. So this thing felt like too cool a creativity tool to pass this up. So here’s my try at doing the same things for games. It immediately deviated into crude jokes (“Ass Effect”) but maybe it can be salvaged. Feel free to join in if you’re on facebook.

Link: Freelancer Pension Petition (german)
There’s a move in government to enforce freelancers to pay money for their pension. This isn’t an especially good idea as freelancers already have a lot of costs to battle with. Forcing this won’t make being a freelancer or entrepeneur easier. So if you’re in Germany feel free to join the petition

Video: Offspring Fling Retro Trailer

The retro vibe is spot on and the best part is how they portrayed Steam.

Link: A MAZE impressions (German)
A few words from various visitors to A MAZE Indie Connect at the german indie blog Indie Inside. I’ve said my share so if you’re curious.

Link: The $10.000.000 Kickstarter
Yes, I’m staying true to my one-kickstarter-link-a-week policy. This time it’s the Pepple E-Paper Watch. It’s broke the 10 million USD barrier and all I can say is “Wow.”

Oh and I guess I’ll have to write a more coherent post about my thoughts on this whole issue.

Video: Video on Fan Art

A video that talks about the relationship of fan art to creatives and content creators. I especially loved the way that the Adventure Time guys used the fan art and the fans reaction to it to feed back into the show.

Link: Badass Bavarian Foods
A hilarious article about German food. She doesn’t get everything right but it’s hilarious. Especially if you’re german.

Link: Urheberrecht, mein Rad (German)
In Germany the debate over copyright has flared up again and there’s lots of words flying around. In my eyes most of this is based on misunderstandings or ignorance on the topic. This satirical article uses the metaphor of the bicycle (that a politician came up with) for copyright to make fun of the “conservative view”. Obviously biased but still hilarious.

Link: Facebook App Store
This is important. Read it.

Video: Mass Effect 3 Indoctrination Theory

Another video on the ME3 indoctrination theory. This time they’ve blown it up to a 84 minute documentation. The effort spent by the fans to believe in anything BUT the ending of ME3 is commendable. Sad, but commendable.

Link: Japan cracking down on Game Mechanics
The Japanese government is looking into making certain F2P game mechanics illegal: a gambling based set collection that is deemed exploitative. Interesting. I can’t say I’m surprised, after all there’s a lot of companies running rampant with the F2P business model and basically abusing their customers. Understandable, because for big companies it often stops to be about the product (if it ever was in the first place) and more about the numbers. Then it’s pretty easy to justify yet another mechanic to squeeze more money out of your players maximize those KPIs. Having the state step in like they did with gambling might be a good thing? Maybe? I’m not sure yet.

Video: Doppler Effect as gesture recognition
A clever team of scientists use the speakers to emit an unhearable sound that the microphone then catches. Thus based on the way it comes back they can recognize gestures. Ingenious.

Music: Puscifier – Humble River

You may know this song from the War for Cybertron Transformers trailer a while back. Execellent song.

Link: Presskit()
From the guys behind Vlambeer comes a tool for Indie Game Devs (and anyone) to quickly and easily set up a good press kit site for the press (d’uh). It looks good from what I can see so far (haven’t tried it out yet). And even if it isn’t perfect I just love the sense of community with the indies – let’s just make this a tool and give it to people for free, cause we can.
FB APP Store

Link: Dwarf Fortress, the book

I’m still not entirely sure if this is a hoax but it certainly is awesome. Selling the manual to a video game as a book? Granted there’s been game guides for quite a long time but those usually were large scale commercial releases, and not obscure, hardcore freeware products. Oh, in case you haven’t heard of Dwarf Fortress, you probably best start by Boatmurdered. It gives you a good look into how Dwarf Fortress works and why it’s so awesome to see it fail.

Link: “Cognitive Psychology” Talk at A MAZE Indie Connect
This link shows a few of the slides from Thomas Bedenks (Brightside Games) talk at A MAZE Indie Connect. He presented his thesis which takes models from different psychologists and melds it into one big framework. The goal is to understand how the player and the designer cognitively process, perceive and act on the game (and other things for that matter). The diagrams in the link above look quite confusing at first glance, I have to admit, but they make a lot of sense. If you haven’t yet looked into this topic checking out the link above might give you a start and some keywords to google for

Article: Superlevel: Cactus Keynote (german)
An article about the keynote from Cactus at the A MAZE festival. It’s a neat little piece that gives you an entertaining glimpse into the creative chaos and the inner conflict of indie games.

Video: The App App
This sketch video is about a app that instantly rates your app ideas. Now if only someone would develop something like that for game ideas. It’d be equally hilarious if you’d ask me. Also this is an excellent segue to my next link:

Article: Why your Game Idea Sucks
This article is already a few years old but still as true as ever. Ideas are usually crappy and not worth a dime – but that’s alright, execution is more important anyway. I’ve just been teaching my basic Game Design course at Gamesacademy in Frankfurt and I’ve spent a good chunk of time discussing this topic. I believe it’s a pretty important one, especially for fledgling designers and when it comes to them chosing their student projects. Also remember the your game idea is too big link from a few weeks past.

Video: If I were a Core

I do not know what it is about portal that brings out the componists and choreographers in people but it certainly is awesome.

Article: Teut Weidemann interview at Quo Vadis (german)
Here Teut talks about his view on the different platforms, their history and possible future. It’s a pretty insightful interview from one of gamings german greats. I had no major disagreements with anything, so that’s good. Right?

Article: The Stanford Education Experiment
This article from wired takes a look at one start up that tries to use web-based learning as a model for the future of education. I’ve found it an interesting read, although not overly spectacular. Regardless I do think that there’s a lot of opportunity in technology to help improve education (which I believe is in a terrible state of disrepair).

Article: Do Video Games need to be Fun?
A written discussion on what video games are and shouldn’t be. Worth a read.

Article: Sham Kickstaer closes down
So it seems like there’s a Kickstarter link each week. After the low point of the Ron Paul Kickstarter I have better news now. A blatant sham Kickstarter was found out and closed down. Not because the Kickstarter company guys did their detective work. Nope. That’s not even remotely doable for them. Instead the day was again saved by the collective power of the internet. Crowdsourced paranoia or sousveillance in a sense. The sleuths of the intertubes figured the sham out and go it closed down. Oddly enough, that gives me hope.

Image: Minecraft art

Not sure where exactly this is from and if it’s really built with minecraft (I doubt it) but it’s a pretty cool picture.

Video: Go Right

A neat little video that is a sort of celebration of the side-scrolling plattformer. I saw a kind of positive message in there based on the game mechanics of those games – regardless how often you get hit, you can always go right

Video: Destructoid A MAZE Indie Connect Impressions

A couple of short clips and impressions from the awesome and very first A MAZE Indie Connect festival I had the pleasure of attending. The festival and attached exhibition were a lot of fun and if you watch closely you should be able to spot me in the video above. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any further Destructoid coverage so far.

Game: Proteus
The winner of this years most amazing game trophy is Protues, an exploratory journey over a procedurally generated island. It is not unlike Dear Esther, but a lot less narrative. If you have no aversion to pixely/voxely art then give this game a try. They’ve gotten the IndieCade 2011 award for their really exceptional procedural music.

Link: Ron Paul Game Kickstarter
I’m a big big fan of Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general. I do believe what it has done for creative projects has an enormous capability to provide real long-term change toward the better. But I’ve been thinking (and talking) a lot about this lately and I do think there’s some hurdles along the way. And bad projects like this one linked to really are where Kickstarter can stumble. Simply using a popular topic to piggyback a bad idea on is bound to dissapoint the backers. Combine that with deliberate fraud and you have a sure recipe for disaster…

Image: Game of Thrones Brawler


A cool image of Game of Thrones envisioned as a Fighting Game. Here’s the link to the DeviantArt Page. But that’s not all. There’s currently two more images that can be found on the artist’s blog and these two are even better than what you see up there.

Link: Game of Drinks
Hangover is coming. The link is to a blog that I’m guessing is written in Italian, yet the images are in English so everyone should be able to understand. They show the rules to a Game of Thrones drinking game, which looks pretty deadly to me. What I did like most is the way how the different houses are represented: You pick one from the available big four and that determines which alcohol you have to drink. There’s always a low alcohol and a high alcohol beverage involved.

Audio: Seven Day Cooldown – The Tangy Zip of Gaben
This premiere podcast features none other than Gabe Newell from Valve Software. They talk about the different games of Valve and it’s corporate ideas and competition. I really enjoyed the interview because it feels like Gabe is talking very candidly. Especially the parts about Apple and EAs Origin were most interesting. Also for some reason I feel this interview shows a lot about the corporate culture at valve, which oddly enough was laid bare a bit more this week already.

If you haven’t seen it, there’s what looks like a legitimate copy of valve’s new employee handbook out on the internet. This of course gives a good insight into the corporate values and ideals, which seem very sensible. Most strikingly I found valve’s way of dealing with that mess: by actually posting the leak on their facebook page.

Link: Startups, This Is How Design Works
A nicely done website about design as a discipline, what it’s goals are and why it is important. They list a set of different design disciplines but don’t mention video games at all, yet I think this is an excellent primer into design for non-designers. The website also argues a lot for the designer as part of the funding team of a startup and gives a few successful examples. Generally a sensible idea for any kind of project that builds products that will be used by humans. In my mind that is where design works, in shaping the interface between product and user, which in the case of furniture for example is primarily the physical shape. And of course if you want to pull in some attention having someone who knows how to make something that people like to look at is generally a good thing to have.

Link: Pentametron
A wonderful website that searches through tweets and looks at those that have the right size and ending to make a small, rhyming poems. To say it in the words of the website: with algorithms subtle and discreet / i seek iambic writings to retweet. Pentametron is done by the artist Ranjit Bhatnagar and is a pretty cool idea and generates some interesting results.

For some reason it also reminds me a lot of the Sprichwortrekombinator. As you can probably see by the url it’s a german site and it’s in german so I’ll explain. What it does is take german idioms, hack them in half and then put a random beginning to a random end. These are always hilarious and sometimes still ring true.

I guess both websites are wonderful applications of a controlled chaotic output that makes people want to look for the meaning.

Image: Mass Effect Comics (Spoilers!)
So I’ve recently had another pinterest pinning spree. After working on my N7 NERF Gun (pictures will follow soon) I’ve again been immersed in Mass Effect so I spent some time pinning pictures to my Mass Effect Board. While I was doing so I found a lot of comics about Mass Effect so that I decided to open up my own Pinterest board for that. Unsurprisingly half of the newer ones deal with the ME3 ending and how they would have done it differently so beware – there be spoilers. And the other half deals with the romance options, usually by showing a lot of Garrus.

Video: Extra Credits: Crowdfunding
This weeks episode of Extra Credits talks about crowdfunding. As always the episode is well made but if you’ve already looked into the topic somewhat there’s little new. Since I’ve spent some time thinking about crowdfunding I kinda enjoyed the fact that they pretty much said what I already believe. Oddly enough that happens a lot with this show. Thinking about it this is slightly unsetteling – do I like the show only because it validates my opinions? I guess I need to find a show I agree less with.