When you've biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems, frankly, pretty absurd.
— Robin Sloan
When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the Internet, but not the Internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the World Wide Web existed, it wasn't generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn't have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web.
I've never believed that Things Should Continue As They Are.
'Gone Home' is a game about exploration, and everything you'll experience is tied intimately to the space of the spooky house around you. Your task is simple: Poke around.
My parents live in northern Michigan, and every year, in the summer, we visit them for a few weeks.
I got a bike - a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can't let that stop you.
When MUDs appeared, that was an entirely novel experience, and often an addictive one. Long before Twitter or Snapchat, MUDs inspired the moral panic of the moment: a 1993 'Wired' article titled 'The Dragon Ate My Homework' described university students losing themselves in these virtual worlds. Keep in mind: they were just words on a screen.
Prediction just means you saw where the world might be going: ho-hum. Influence, though - ah. Influence, direct and acknowledged, means you actually steered the world, even if only a tiny bit.
'Minecraft' is a game about creation, yes. But it is just as much a game about secret knowledge.
What is a game like 'No Man's Sky,' really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that's inert without the trigger of human attention.
When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page.
Social systems have values - arguments baked into their design. For example, Twitter's core argument seems to be, 'Everything should be public, and messages should find the largest audience possible.' Snapchat's might be, 'Communication should be private and ephemeral.'
If I am honest with myself, a not-insignificant fraction of my enjoyment of any episode of 'Game of Thrones' is delivered in its opening moments. I sit down, settle in, and... BUM-bum, bah-dah-BUM-bum.
If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside.
