Carpets now in Minecraft —

You may now get carpet in Minecraft and get Minecraft carpet. Sort of. — Rob •

Chris Evans sez, "I made this 8bit London Underground map a while ago, entirely in Tile Studio with a bit of Gimp to add text."

Finished Super Mario Bros 3 Zone 1 tube map. Now without stupid watermark and decent resolution.

From IfIndustries, an (apparently?) unavailable but rather clever line of Pac-Man hoodies (one ghost shown, all ghosts in set).

Pac-man & Ghosts Hoddies (via Geeks Are Sexy)

Skit-B Pinball built this custom Duck Hunt pinball machine by modding a 1962 'Williams Valiant' table and hybridizing it with a PC to provide sound effects and other nifties. The project was a little break from Skit-B's main undertaking, a gonzo-awesome pinball adaptation of Predator.

(via Geekologie)

YOU is the second novel from Austin Grossman, whose 2008 debut Soon I Will be Invincible marked him out as a talent to watch. Now, with his second novel, he confirms his status as a major talent.

You is the story of Russell, who tries to leave behind his nerdy, computer-game-programming high-school life to get a law degree, but by the end of the 90s, he's dropped out and come to work at Black Arts, a game studio founded by three of his school buddies -- the three who stayed true to their nerdy roots. Black Arts is famous for its brilliant simulation engine, which was written by Simon, Russell's old school buddy, who has just died under mysterious circumstances, leaving the company he founded in uncertain shape.

Russell's story weaves in the fascinating fictional canon of the Black Arts games, his history as a teenager encountering the first generation of PCs, and the white-hot fever of a game studio whose existence depends on shipping a game to beat all the other games ever made. As a piece of fiction about life in a high-tech company, You ranks with Microserfs for its portrayal of the romance and heroism of wresting life from endless lines of code, and with JPOD for its pitiless depiction of the alienation and loneliness of a life inside a machine.

But Grossman isn't just chronicling the rise and fall of a company, or of a character, or even an industry. Rather, he uses YOU as a tool to prise open the mystical center of what art is, what games are, what fun is, and how they all mix together. Some of YOU reads as pure poetry, others like a fascinating treatise on the unplumbed depths of the ludic urge, and taken as a whole, it is a novel that both uplifts and entertains, and reframes the world we live in and the things we do in it. It is easily one of the best books I've read this year.

Incidentally, Austin Grossman comes from quite an exceptional family. His identical twin brother is Lev Grossman (author of the fantastic novel The Magicians), while his sister, Bathsheba Grossman, is a justly renowned sculptor who produces 3D printed mathematical solids. I am pleased to say I have many works from all three siblings in my office.

YOU

PixelJam's Retro Unicorn Attack takes the Erasure-themed game and demakes it even better. Play it just for the fantastic chiptune version of Always.

"Oh, man! It's so real!"

I love Bruce Sterling's "Design Fiction Slider-Bar of Disbelief," a list of fictions in ascending order of credibility:

9.4 New age crystals, lucky charms, protective pendants, mojo hands, voodoo dolls, magic wands

9.3 Quack devices, medical hoaxes

9.3 Fantasy “objects” in fantasy cinema and computer-games

9.2 Physically impossible sci-fi literary devices: time machines, humanoid robots

9.2 Perpetual motion machines; free-energy gizmos, other physically impossible engineering fantasies

9.0 State libels, black propaganda, military ruses; missile gaps, vengeance weapons, Star Wars SDI

8.9 “Realplay” services, “experiential futurism” encounters, military and emergency training drills, props and immersive set-design, scripted personas

8.8 Online roleplaying scenario games

8.7 Net.art interventions, diegetic performance art, provocative device-art scandals

8.6 Guerrilla street-theater; costumes, puppets, banners, songs, lynchings-in-effigy, mock trials, mass set-designed Nuremberg rallies, propaganda trains

8.5 Fake products, product forgeries, theft-of-services, con-schemes, 419 frauds

Spoiler alert: the list ends with these:

1.0 Engineering specifications, software code

0.5 Historical tech assessment of extinct technologies, the “judgement of history’

0.0 The ideal and unobtainable “objective truth” about objects and services

Design Fiction: The Design Fiction Slider-Bar of Disbelief

Nicole Brauer's The Guardian is a dreamlike adventure about a boy with a girl's name who feels compelled to leave the village where he is shunned. I love both the Shadow of The Colossus-inspired design and the fact that your sprite is a single pixel seen from afar—like my own TinyHack, but backed by beautiful artwork and effective storytelling. Kevin McLeod's ominous music ties the mood together.

BioShock, finis —

The BioShock series, notable for the doomed libertarian dystopias into which the player is sent, took a startling turn in its latest outing, Bioshock Infinite. Taking place in a perversely patriotic theme-park echo of America, its spectacular world-building and storytelling generated critical acclaim, but its generic gameplay prompted second thoughts. Leigh Alexander puts it like so: "Infinite's is a sterile, mechanized system that could have been ripped from any other listless hyper-modern game like a bloody spine and grafted messily onto this vision, obscuring it. It doesn't even do it well; I wouldn't even say competently." — Rob •