Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

But right now I'm busy working on it. So here is a teaser:

I spent about 35 minutes on this all together; I was challenging myself to create a reasonable approximation of the reference image as quickly and simply as possible. There are definitely details in the source image that are not captured in this version (such as the "concentric" trails around the center, the seeming alternating attraction and repulsion, etc.), but at a quick glance, the similarities are undeniable.

Experiment successful.

• Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python

  In this interactive tutorial, we'll cover many essential Python idioms and techniques in depth, adding immediately useful tools to your belt.

  tags: python, programming, tutorial

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This is a fairly simply note taking tool. It lets you create a new note from a global hotkey, and quickly jot down whatever is on your mind. The note can then be tagged, and is saved as soon as you finish typing.

Once you've got a heap of notes, you can browse all your notes on a long roll sorted by date, filtering them by tags or keyword searches. This is pretty expected functionality, but in practice Evernote makes the process very smooth an intuitive.

Finally, Evernote has a few other special features that bump it over a glorified todo.txt:

• Full RTF and HTML support, so notes can be formatted with bullets, tables and images.
• Online syncing and writing: You can rune Evernote on multiple computers and have the same set of notes on each, as well as creating and accessing those notes online, and posting new notes by email.
• If you use the online syncing, it also performs text recognition in photos, which is used by the search index. Take a photo of that napkin game design, email it to your notebook, and search for it later.

Evernote is definitely not a replacement for the personal wiki that many of us have. It doesn't allow notes to be linked to each other, and can't impose any structure on notes other than tags and dates. But for something fast, easy, and transparent to make sure that your ideas get recorded somewhere, and are available whenever you need them, you could hardly do better.

Evernote Home Page

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

One thing that's always been important to me is this particular definition of play, not related to gaming: That play is the amount of slack or looseness in a system. ("The gears kept slipping because they had too much play.") Extending this, for me personally play has always been about sandboxing within a system. That is, flexing against the rules of a system in order to find creativity. Those who know me can attest that I lean towards sim games and sandbox games, and that I get an absurd amount of entertainment from silly software toys. Puzzle games have become a surprising well of joy for me in the past few years. Conversely, I've become increasingly weary of linear games, narrative games, and 'mindless action games'.

This morning I was playing around in Ableton Live, a software synthesizer. As I was tweaking some parameter on an instrument, it occurred to me that I was getting the same kind of elation and flow that I get when I'm playing Dwarf Fortress, taking the system that is there and trying to make something new and beautiful. I also get these same sensations playing with pure simulators such as Darwin Bots.

Most of the joy I get out of gaming comes from this play. It has occurred to me lately that play is more general than gaming, and that it extends off the computer. This, along with conversations like the one in the TED video, have prompted me to look back into my childhood and examine some specific examples of play that aren't necessarily related to gaming that I can bring forward again and place into my game designs.

Basically, Chris proposes 6 biological reasons that games become addictive, and ties them in to several commonly used player profiles. The article is very interesting and worth a read, but I think that a quick summary is valuable as well:

1. Skinnerian Reward Schedules: Pleasure is caused by working towards and attaining something. "Achiever" (Bartle).
2. Solving a Difficult Challenge (devising strategies, solving puzzles): Pleasure is induced from making a good decision. The harder the decision, the greater the reward.
3. Surviving a Difficult Challenge ("hardcore" gaming): A large pleasure hit when "victory" is achieved. Often accompanied by a kind of pleasureable anger while trying to overcome the challenge. "Hard Fun" (Lazzaro), "Conqueror" (Bateman)
4. Satisfaction of Curiosity (through things such as exploration): Pleasure comes from the sense of wonder of novelty, and from finding things that are 'interesting'. "Easy Fun" (Lazzaro), "Explorer" (Bartle)
5. Inciting Excitement (time pressures, combo chains, extreme speeds and orientations, fear): Is generally pleasureable to experience excitement. Also increases reward from finally achieving victory. "Serious Fun" (Lazzaro)
6. Playing with Trusted Associates: Simply interacting with people we trust (either friends or strangers) causes pleasure. "Socializers" (Bartle)

• The first three are "Big Hits" of pleasure, but generally have more displeasureable penalties or conditions for success (e.g. grinding to achieve a level).
• The last three are "Continuous Hits", easier to achieve as a player but not as powerful overall.

Also, just for the record: Bateman Player Types, Bartle Player Profiles, Lazzaro Player Experiences.