My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
Something new – the airline (SAS) finally got around to providing wireles internet on long-haul flights, so I am blogging this over the ocean northwest of Denmark. Good thing on a 9-hour flight.
I don’t think it will add significantly to the quality of blogging in general, but it turns plane trips into something actually useful.
The ping to back home is 650ms, so no Counter-Strike for today.
It comes from looking too often at the Playstation 2 startup screen: I wondered what the principle was behind the 7 circling dots:
Here’s how it works: The 7 dots simply move around a circle, increasing the distance from each other while the sine and cosine parts of the circle go out of sync (this makes it look like the circle is “turning” in space). Sometimes the dots overlap to give the impression of fewer dots. It’s hard to explain, but I find it extremely cool that they chose to use 7 dots (rather than the more pedestrian 8).
So I recreated it using the new version 6 of wonderful Game Maker (the registered version). Download your own Project file, executable, windowed executable.
Tech stuff: In order to combat comment spam, I’ve added some behind-the-scenes checks in the comment system. If you experience problems posting a comment, please drop me a line.
Things may be behaving erratically the next few days.
(This, by the way, is the new server.)
The blog now runs WordPress. To prove that I retain my techie sensibilities, I only wanted blog software in PHP since I understand that much in the way I don’t understand Perl. Trusting your valuable writing (i.e. data) to alien software always feels dangerous … though it’s an attitude that doesn’t always pay off in hours saved.