Bill Thompson’s set something off again:

“I have to end with a whinge – as a technical pedant, I’m annoyed at the use of the word broadband for what is really just a moderately fast, always on connection, but I can live with it.

It does not mean fast, but when the marketing droids at the telecoms companies were looking for a word to describe alternatives to dialup connection, it was the unlucky victim and is now a ruined word.

I think this is a shame, and wish we had a better word for a fairly fast, always-on connection. Any suggestions? “

Here’s the thing. Bill’s “former audience” have come up with a great suggestion for rebranding broadband.

Scroll down the bottom of the story, and 8 posts there’s a suggestion by “Daniel, UK”. He suggests that we no longer refer to “broadband” but instead…

“Permanet”

I love that. It describes what’s best about having an always-on connection – being permanently connected to your friends, your community, your favourite sources of information and the potential of the internet; and swipes away the marketing-notion that it’s all about having fat-content pushed at you.

I’m not buying broadband – I want my Permanet!

Thank you “Daniel, UK” whoever you are!

» BBC News: Riding the internet’s fast lane

Dan’s put together a great long post covering his thoughts on adaptive design and what he calls ‘The New Rationalism’. Well worth a read.

“Design dissolves in behaviour” is a beautiful quote that Dan uses in the post, which comes from Naoto Fuksawa, which I fully intend to overuse and generally beat people around the head with until they’re sick of hearing it.

»

Victor cheers me up:

“Technology advances and, amazingly, becomes less expensive. We figure out new ways to use it. We adapt to it and it to us as a matter of habit. If there’s a reason we don’t want to use it, fine, then we won’t. But if we want to, we’ll find a way to make it workable. Being too hard isn’t a reason to dismiss it.

Invent! Refine! Design!”

Yup. I reckon that’s the right way around.

» Noise Between Stations: ‘Just Keep Trying’

Simon sends game design theory and game theory links a-plenty. Simon is v.smart (he beat us at the Idler/NTK videogames pub-quiz last week, after all… if only I hadn’t confused Sinistar with Gravitar! I’m such a lam3r! Curses!), but he’s apparently allergic to blogs… so many thanks to him for permission to blog this excellent link-base alpha, and to Celia for prodding him.

Over to Simon:

“Subject: game design and game theory

… both related but very different.

Game Theory is more about psychology : things like the Coventry Problem
– do we let the Germans drop bombs on Coventry even though it will kill
thousands but may save hundred of thousands in the future because they
still won’t know that we’ve broken Enigma?, Prisoners Dilemma – if you
all keep quiet then we’ll let you go but (or only keep you for
$small_time) but if one of you speaks up he’ll go free and the rest of
you will be killed, and the Hawks and Hares – any system with Hawks
(consumers) and Hares (producers) will necessarily return to
equilibrium.

Good books for that are :
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Vintage) by Robert Wright
Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict by Roger B. Myerson
Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction by Morton D. Davis
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga
Game Theory and the Social Contract – Vol. 1 by K. G. Binmore
A Course in Game Theory by Martin J. Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein
The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

and I think
Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois
is supposed to be good.

It’s a very broad subject and those books cover a big swathe. Most of
what I know is mostly about tactics and not about games (weirdly
enough) so I can’t vouch for everything. I always found ‘Il Principe’
and ‘the Art of War’ to be quite good things to read along with Game Theory books.

As for Game Design – as in ‘I want to sit down and plan out a
game which I well sell to unwashed people with poor social skills
and too many consoles’ – there aren’t that many good books since it
tends to be more of a black art. The best suggestion is to read as much
as possible about the games industry and play a shed load of games. May
be hang around arcades and just people watch.

Game Design: Secret of the Sages by Marc Saltzman
– gets mixed reviews. Some people swear by it and it doesn’t contain any
code so it’s nice an non scary.

Game Design: The Art & Business of Creating Games by Bob Bates
– is good on how a game gets made.

Game Design: Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse
– gets reccomended by Amazon. Have no idea, never read it.

The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford (I think)
– out of print but seminal early 80s work

Apart from them read books like …

Trigger Happy by Steven Poole
Joystick Nation by JC Herz
Game Over – How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff
Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakura
Opening the Xbox by Dean Takahashi
The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steve L. Kent

As for web sites

http://www.gamasutra.com/ # especially the lectures at GDC, the Post mortems and the articles
http://www.ludology.org/
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1822/ijigs11.htm
http://www.gamestudies.org/ # not that it’s ever updated
http://www.joystick101.org/
http://www.knowledge.hut.fi/projects/games/gamelinks.html
http://www.game-research.com/

Hope that’s enough :)”

Erm… yeah… I reckon that’ll keep me occupied for a while…