Weekly Links #179

Hello, everyone. Only half a dozen links today, and relatively disjoint, too. Let's go in reverse chronological order.

For one thing, Gamasutra reposts an old postmortem of KOTOR, with some interesting lessons to take home. On a related note, if about a newer game, Hardcore Gaming 101 runs an in-depth article on Tides of Numenera, covering what works and what doesn't in this much awaited title. Without going into details, the former's problems are still relevant, while the latter's are sadly unsurprising.

But often the difficulties in this business aren't technological but human in nature, and it was refreshing to hear about Unity's new program to help developers from the Middle East make it to conferences in Europe. Not much to say about this either, except it's about time to make the global discourse be about the whole world again.

To go off-topic for a moment, Peregrine Wade writes about why short movies matter, It's a very good point, and once again, gaming is ahead of the film industry (not to mention the book industry) in recognizing the value of shorter works that don't outstay their welcome. And interactive fiction was there first.

Speaking of which, Jason Dyer discusses moments that can only work in a parser-based game, in the context of an obscure old adventure, while on the intfiction.org forums the prolific reviewer known as Mathbrush started an overview of every year in the IFComp, that's already at 2002 as of this writing.

But I'm already at the end. See you next week.