Surprisingly, one of the best reviews so far comes from The New Yorker. I feel they really get the game …

Simon Parkin in The New Yorker:

Video games like Destiny are entire worlds that are governed by the rules and systems that their designers lay down. Because of this, they often take on the systems of the culture in which they are created, in this case, late capitalism. You are thrust into a world, told to work (here, your work is to harvest glimmer, a currency dropped by aliens), and use the fruits of your labor to improve your equipment. These upgrades allow you to work more quickly, more efficiently, or for greater gains. In this way, the ecosystem of investment and yield is established, an Ouroboros that is both irresistible and, by design, never completely satisfying. It replicates the familiar grind of consumerism; you are made to feel constantly dissatisfied with your possessions because you have the knowledge that there’s always a slightly better gun, cloak, or helmet just out of the reach of affordability.

So you return to work in order to save up. The better your equipment, the greater your social status with other players. The greater your social status, the more they will want you on their team and the more they will envy your achievements, which are clearly displayed in the clothes that you wear (in the game’s later stages, the only way to advance your character is by equipping him or her with better items). In this way, from a certain angle at least, Destiny exposes the alluring futility of the consumerist systems on the other side of the screen.

Use the archive.is link below to avoid their annoying paywall.

2 times 8 for 12, then one perfect score, woot.

Dan Golding:

Taken in their simplest, most basic form, a videogame is a creative application of computer technology. For a while, perhaps, when such technology was found mostly in masculine cultures, videogames accordingly developed a limited, inwards-looking perception of the world that marked them as different from everyone else. This is the gamer, an identity based on difference and separateness. When playing games was an unusual activity, this identity was constructed in order to define and unite the group (and to help demarcate it as a targetable demographic for business). It became deeply bound up in assumptions and performances of gender and sexuality. To be a gamer was to signal a great many things, not all of which are about the actual playing of videogames.

When, over the last decade, the playing of videogames moved beyond the niche, the gamer identity remained fairly uniformly stagnant and immobile. Gamer identity was simply not fluid enough to apply to a broad spectrum of people. It could not meaningfully contain, for example, Candy Crush players, Proteus players, and Call of Duty players simultaneously. When videogames changed, the gamer identity did not stretch, and so it has been broken.

And lest you think that I’m exaggerating about the irrelevance of the traditionally male dominated gamer identity, recent news confirms this, with adult women outnumbering teenage boys in game-playing demographics in the USA.

The predictable ‘what kind of games do they really play, though—are they really gamers?’ response says all you need to know about this ongoing demographic shift. This insinuated criteria for ‘real’ videogames is wholly contingent on identity (i.e. a real gamer shouldn’t play Candy Crush, for instance).

On the evidence of the last few weeks, what we are seeing is the end of gamers, and the viciousness that accompanies the death of an identity.

It’s out.

Facebook video, also here.

Fun puzzles.

Prior to Rohrer’s talk, a few hundred envelopes were placed on the seats in the room. Printed on the envelope: “Please do not open yet.” After Rohrer described his game, he asked attendees to open their envelopes. Inside each one is a piece of paper with 900 sets of GPS coordinates. In total, Rohrer gave the audience more than 1 million unique GPS coordinates. He estimates that if one person visits a GPS location each day with a metal detector, the game will be unearthed sometime within the next million days — a little over 2,700 years.

Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play.

Via kottke.org.

Via John Gruber at Daring Fireball I found two good puzzle games:
3D Logic and Bloxorz

Posted by topmen to Wohba!.

Top Men spent many childhood hours mesmerized by the patterns and frustrated by the limitations of the good old Spirograph.

The game itself is the classic worm game, played in non-euclidean space - that is to say, it is played on the surface of various three-dimensional shapes.

I highly recommend the blind version of the game. Kinda gives you a headache after a while though.