* First few photos from my epic trip to China on my sabbatical in September/October last year: Tea and Temples.

* The Wired Jester: My year in books, 2009.

For Custom PC and bit-tech

* Killing is fun. This was a blog post for bit-tech, and looked at the problem with FPS games set in a war-time environment: namely that the mechanics of the game are in opposition to the morality of the situation: to make the game fun, the killing has to be fun also:

“In every FPS you need to kill hundreds, if not thousands of people as you progress through the game. In fact, you’re not killing people: you’re removing obstacles, because single player games that aren’t primarily puzzle games or simulators are always about progress through the level. To impede progress and to make it challenging for the player, you need obstacles. These can be puzzles, but since you’re not making a puzzle game, it’s better if these are enemies, and it’s better if these enemies can tax the player by fighting back. When you, as the player, eliminate the enemies, you’re granted power-ups, new weapons and keys to enable you to access more of the game (and in turn cope with more powerful enemies). It’s such a simple and recursive formula that it needs to be jazzed up – it needs to be made fun, because you need to do it over and over and over again. It’s work.”

* My Best Gaming Moment of 2009. My contribution to a feature written for that flat period at the end of the year when there’s not much new happening but the site still needs updating. I picked playing Rock Band as my ‘moment’:

“The things I write and pictures I take are somehow less personal, less meaningful than things I read and the movies I see. This is especially the case with the songs I hear. If I’m taking notes for a piece of writing, I’ll often end up scrawling favourite song lyrics in the margins, signposts to where I want to get to. It often feels as if my meaning is inside the song, and I need to hear it to get to what I want. Fragments of melody lodge themselves in my head, and I’ll end up needing exactly the right song to write certain paragraphs. So it was obvious I was going to love Guitar Hero.”

* Noby Noby Boy review. A look at the newest game from the Lead Designer of Katamari Damacy:

“Despite Noby Noby Boy’s cute, naïve looks and non-lethal gameplay it will probably be one of the more divisive games of the year. Some will look at it as a beautiful piece of art that expands the notion that videogames are a more complex and involving form of art than anything else we currently have. Others will take one look at the flat shading, coy terminology and recoil in disgust. Several members of the bit-tech team certainly did when we had Noby Noby Boy running in the labs.”

For The Wired Jester

* Already mentioned a lot, but it was from 2009 so deserves a place in this round up post: write up of my visit to Peleliu, in the South Pacific, and its haunting WW2 relics.

* Virtual Reality, Then and Now. A short post on the fact VR is about computers bleeding into real life, not the other way around:

“In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched… Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality.”

* On the importance of The Beatles releasing their music digitally:

“And so now they’re missing. Everyone learns the truth that the Beatles are Important with a capital I. The Best. The Greatest. Whatever is left that the other Apple has done well to build up. But the music just isn’t there. It’s absent from the places where the kids – the people who live and breathe music – are, and where everyone is increasingly going to be. iTunes is the biggest music retailer now, Guitar Hero is mainstream entertainment. The Beatles are abstract, venerated, protected. Their name is known, but I suspect knowledge – and love – of their songs is dipping lower and lower.”

(Somewhat dated now, with the release of Rock Band, but the points about their absence from TV/Film/iTunes stands.)

Fiction

The book is currently called The Fine Sort. Seven or eight chapters done, about 30,000 words or so. Nothing to post here just yet, but I did put together a collection of short stories and print them via Lulu. The result was excellent – great quality printing, lovely cover, nice stock. Some samples to follow on here.

(1) Pun not intended, and only applicable to those who remember film cameras.

Camera: iPhone 3G, processed with Camerabag app.

A favourite image of mine, snapped on the iPhone at Tate’s Rothko show. I entered it into a competition run by Penguin to win a big print of the new cover artwork for 1984. To win, you had to enter an image that reflected 1984; I chose this shot because it’s funnier and stranger than a lot of 1984-derived images tend to be, although of course, it doesn’t shy away from the central darkness of the novel – how bleak life is when words cannot be trusted.

Camera: Nikon D40
Lens: Nikon 18-55 (kit lens)

Not a place many people visit, but I’d agree with Rough Guide when they call Taipei Asia’s most under-rated city. Here’s some photos not of motherboards or netbooks, but of the place where they’re born.

Tokyo is not the easiest place to see traditional Japan. The damage Tokyo sustained in World War II, and the staggering amount of wealth it generated in the years after mean that its temples are all skyscrapers. Kyoto has the Zen gardens and rice-paper screens: in Tokyo, it’s shopping mazes and LED screens. Peaceful contemplation has given way to the wisdom of crowds. But you can still seek out more traditional aspects of Japan in the captial – one of the last places I visited was a stroll garden: Koishikawa Korakuen.