Tag : culture

Have you heard of Portal 2? Surprisingly, for what is effectively an esoteric puzzle game, you might have.

The developers, Valve, have promoted it heavily having had little success finding an agency that understood the game.

No one knows the product better than the people who made it. We’ve had many creative kick-off meetings with agencies over the years, and you’d be shocked by the treatments that have come back. Copycat treatments. Cliché treatments. Treatments that reveal the agency weren’t listening in the initial meeting."

The really interesting thing about Portal 2, though, is the humour. The original game, Portal, was funny, but as this review highlights, where "Portal was a sequence of great jokes, Portal 2 is that rare beast, an actual video game comedy – and one of the funniest ever".

Launching today, the Hackers! newspaper is an exciting new idea aimed at doing things you're not supposed to do. A quarterly paper edited by Leila Johnston, fresh from a highly entertaining live-on-Skype interview with Dominic Diamond at Playful '10, it features articles on wide range of subjects, from hacking time to side-channel attacks and even Victorian hackers.

I learned to read a long time ago, but I can still remember the sheer amazingness of the discovery — like I’d found the keys to the universe and all of a sudden, EVERYTHING made sense. Words were everywhere and I was powering through them like a mad thing (and mispronouncing a fair few, I ought to add).

Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.