Author Archives: Jonathan Beilin

To Ilya Zhitomirskiy, for making Beowulves of us all

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: November 14, 2011

Last Saturday, my friend Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away. He was spirited and friendly and inspirational. Ilya talked often of slaying dragons. To Ilya, dragons were big organizations which he felt had negative social influences, ranging from Facebook to the RIAA/MPAA to the broken education systems here and abroad to violent gangs. He had an adventure […]

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A Barren Field

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: September 14, 2011

He was a programmer. His job wasn’t easy but he mostly could do it. He’d been doing what he’d been doing for a few years now. Today he stared at his computer screen as hundreds of little red flags marched and swarmed like angry army ants up his display. The errors were weird. He didn’t […]

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Disintegration of Memory / p55-Echo release

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: April 27, 2011

Final video: http://vimeo.com/22947080 p55-Echo draft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iYSa7Wt_ZY p55-Echo code: https://github.com/dongle/p55-echo Tools for final video: Photoshop, Twixtor, After Effects, PaulStretch

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Touch-based Game Interaction Design Considerations

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: March 20, 2011

A few days ago, Bennett Foddy of QWOP fame asked me what my favorite iPad games were. I unsarcastically replied with Chicanery (a game he made with Auntie Pixelante), before stammering about non-game ‘toys’, ‘art games’ that barely qualify as games, and simple iPhone ports. There are good games on the iPad, yet very few […]

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Are you sure you want to start a company? (A Letter to Y Combinator Applicants)

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: March 18, 2011

INTRO Opinions are like earholes – everyone has two of them – so don’t take this as straight facts. I’ll gloss the obvious stuff about building a founding team: everyone has to be smart and at least one person on your team has to be able to build stuff. That said, it’s OK to have a person on your […]

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Carles is the Warhol of Twitter

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: January 20, 2011

Playing games with the form and function of Twitter is nothing new. Tim Waters started the ubiquitous “Sometimes I just want to copy someone else’s status… ” meme, which has already lived several cycles on both Twitter and Facebook, and still reawakens every couple months. Jonah Peretti created a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience via a […]

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Uncharted’s Cinematic Camera

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: January 19, 2011

“Cinematic” has appeared in the marketing materials for games for years, seeing particular growth beginning with the advent of the CD-ROM. At first, cinematic referred merely to the presence of live-action or CG full-motion-video cutscenes – having a closer, non-fixed perspective combined with a dialogue soundtrack was sufficient for a game to be perceived as having some […]

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Futilitrist art

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: December 1, 2010

Sometime in the last couple months I developed an intense loathing towards my (past, present, and future) writing and started smearing pigments on objects instead. The “best” works are appearing on a tumblr because I have strong feelings regarding individual creation and sharing and putting art into a communal space. In other news, if you’d […]

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Silicon Valley Blues, part 1

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: September 9, 2010

It is with some degree of something that I find myself in Silicon Valley back in the fold of the games industry. Given my philosophical orientation, this is akin to being a crack dealer, albeit without the physical risks (and, for the time being, also without the monetary rewards). But it’s an enjoyable task, and […]

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Paternalistic “feminism”

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: July 5, 2010

RT @(redacted): Most girls that I know or have met look prettier without makeup. Just sayin’, ladies… I understand that tweet was well intentioned, but it may as well have read: HEY LADIES MY SENSE OF AESTHETICS HAS RESULTED IN A NEW DICTUM FOR YOUR APPEARANCE Hey guys, how about we stop assuming that women’s looks […]