2016-08-22

I didn’t read the entire article because it is too rambly and I don’t share the author’s affection for writing assembly, but a few fragments resonate well with me, for example this one:

“At numerous times I found that conscious isolation can sometimes indeed lead to more direct insights, techniques and solutions to existing problems, which otherwise are not taken into account, if all of our activity is only based on and influenced by the prior research of others. Focus always has a cost and research takes time. That is especially true in today’s open source culture and the endless hourly influx of hip new projects via social media.”

interview with Peter Chung

“I think people, in order to work, they have to focus on the process because the content doesn’t inspire them. […] Blinded by the process so that they, you know, are interested in at least something because, yeah, it’s a hard reality when the thing that you’re working on just isn’t really good.”

“It’s completely wrong to apply the same standards of critique to works that are made with different intents.”

“It also included several interesting phrases which stood out to me, including Every Atom Procedural and Every Planet Unique. On its own, this language was not a surprising angle for a game to take in its marketing. The Binding of Isaac’s Steam page, for example, promises ‘you never play the same game twice‘ but no-one so much as raises an eyebrow when they sit down and discover that they are, shockingly, playing The Binding Of Isaac every time.”

“When we use extreme language to talk about procedural generators (or any other kind of technology), we encourage people to draw extreme conclusions.”

“For many other generators, you might think that explaining how its processes work would be kind of… boring? You’d probably be right. A lot of generators are boring, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we reach for the big numbers and strong statements, to cover up this fact.”

“Drawing his finger across the screen, he nudged the lever bars to indicate attributes like body mass, aggressiveness, windpipe length, wetness, screechiness, harshness. (The software makes sounds based on roughly a hundred different parameters.) Then, while moving his thumbs across two graphical boxes on the iPad—one labelled “vowel map,” the other “pitch”—and simultaneously twisting the device in space, he generated a vocalization. The iPad’s physical movement determined the energy behind the utterance: the arc of the motion shaping the sound’s arc.”


links collected by
Maciej Konieczny

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