A recent class assignment involved creating a two-player game. I liked the idea of videogame mashups (a friend made Joust Pong) and wanted to experiment with the idea of different rulesets per player, thus Pong Invaders was born, a game where one player controls the space invaders while another player controls the iconic pong paddle in a grand badminton battle involving kamikaze aliens and lasers. Read More
Thoughts on Apple Post-WWDC 2010
It’s half an hour before Steve Jobs’ keynote on a brisk Monday morning in San Francisco. The line of people anxious to see the latest Apple products wraps around a city block, the excitement driven partly because these products now provide a lifeline and an income source to thousands of independent developers, and partly from a particularly potent brand of raw consumer lust which is seemingly unique to Apple’s brand and its products. The cult of mac is so strong that there is even an Apple-specific dating site which, despite a cheesy name and an ostensibly idiotic premise (Apple-love as a positive bias for mating-pool selection is about as effective for cutting groups of 20– and 30-somethings as finding people who like fun, or ice-cream [although finding people who dislike ice-cream might be useful for pairing vegans and the lactose-intolerant.]) seems poised to succeed at least in terms of community if not profit (the revenue-model is as yet unannounced).
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