Weekly Links #106
Hello, everyone. With all my attention these days going into efforts
to self-publish a couple of new books, I ended up not just with few
links, but also nothing much to say about them at all. Still, let me
see if I can find a few words. *rifles through pockets*
For one thing, An Accidental Man's retrospective of landmark computer
games has reached Prince of Persia, and the article has much
to say about storytelling via gameplay, something most game designers
don't even try to achieve, instead running scared right back to
cutscenes. (Or worse, spin-offs in other media entirely.) Maybe it is
because, as I wrote on other occasions, most creators don't even like
games, and keep trying to turn them into movies or books...
In unrelated news, Gamasutra is running a feature on the state of
game development in Africa. Which is, sadly, pretty much
what I was expecting. But hey, it's a big continent, and people are
trying. It's the rest of us, elsewhere in the world, who need to pay
attention.
Last but not least, a couple of friends alerted me to the tweet above,
to the effect that UK publisher Usborne now offers free downloads of
their old Basic programming books from the 1980s. I haven't
looked at them yet, but such books often have more than historical and
nostalgic value: there was a lot of ingenuity involved in designing
compelling games small enough to be typed in without excessive effort,
not to mention able to run reasonably well on 8-bit machines despite
being written in Basic. We're truly spoiled nowadays... and we don't
seem to know what to do with our privilege.
And that's really all I have this week. See you around.