think or thwim

Jesse Schell explains why your web connected toothbrush may make you want to be a better person.

:: Pauric

Avoid Tone Matrix if you need to be productive.

Update: The original seems to be down. Try this one: Hobnox

I’ve never thought of a game as elegant before, but Auditorium is an elegant game.

Petri Purho is creating a new game every month. In June his creation was Crayon Physics - similar to the MIT sketch understanding system. In this video he demonstrates his upcoming longer, more detailed version called Crayon Physics Deluxe.

Download the original Crayon Physics at his website: Kloonigames.com

Purho says “It’s a butt ugly prototype, that was hacked together in five days.” There are only seven levels, but it’s well worth trying out.

There are also user created levels:

• The first four.
• Another one.
• Lots more.

(thanks Itai)

Bloxorz is a good puzzle game.

:: Kottke.org

Will Wright designs his games like the toys he played with in Montessori school.

Montessori taught me the joy of discovery…It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.

In this TED talk he describes his game design philosophy and demonstrates his upcoming game, Spore, which he says is not so much a game as an imagination amplifier.

Peter Molyneux talks about his strategies to make players feel emotional attachment to a virtual dog in the upcoming game Fable 2.

He went into more detail about it when he demonstrated the game at GDC 2007. Part 2 of 4:

Molyneux has had an interesting career. Take a look at his Wikipedia page.

:: New Scientist

I’m in the middle of about 15 half-written posts, but something important came up. The new version of Desktop Tower Defense was just released, and I’ve been conducting research to see if I should recommend it or not. There are some new towers and creeps, but the regular levels aren’t much different. The “10,000 gold” version with 100 levels under the “fun” menu is great:

Desktop Tower Defense v1.5

Circlo is a nice simple game:

that’s more challenging that it looks.

:: Ursi :: RGS