The return of your daily guide to what's good to read, as well as a few of those wacko, kaleidoscopic stories.

Game Design Fundamentals

In the Guardian today, Denki game designer Gary Penn is interviewed about game design fundamentals. For anyone in the business of game creation, or looking to cut a way in, I'd mark this out as an essential read.  It's passionately back to basics stuff, which makes it  all the more powerful. Here's a quote:

"It's about trying to get results as soon as you possibly can, using things like repertoire – as in, the known, the familiar, the practiced, the repeatable. Things like middleware would fall into that category. Use any tools you've used before, any code you've used before, any frameworks you've used before; because getting the results is the most important thing. You've got to get shit happening – you can talk about it, you can write it down, it means nothing until you actually make it and think f**k that's nothing like what I thought it was going to be! That happens most of the time."

Telling Stories

Fullbright, a game blogger well worth your RSS, is talking about storytelling in games today, and the wholly fallacious thinking that so often goes into this subject.

"Video games are driven by the player, experientially and emotionally. Fictional content--setting, characters, backstory-- is useful inasmuch as it creates context for what the player chooses to do. This is ambient content, not linear narrative in any traditional sense. The creators of a gameworld should be lauded for their ability to believably render an intriguing fictional place-- the world itself and the characters in it. However the value in a game is not to be found in its ability at storytelling, but in its potential for storymaking."

'We Drove the Warthog'.

OXM has a feature called 'We Drove the Warthog'. Writer Alistair Wallis skipped off to Wellington, New Zealand, to drive the vehicle that had originally been built for the fated Halo movie. He had fun.

Quote from grinning vehicle engineer, Peter Osborne: "The motor’s a six-cylinder diesel automatic, full four-wheel drive. Then we stuck a turbo on i. “I was pushing for a V8, but I got overruled on that one. They said it might be overkill.”

Dude Threatens to Blow Up Game Publisher

From Kotaku, the explosive tale of a fella who, dissatisfied with the quality of Hudsonsoft's games, threatened the bomb the company. He's been arrested and confessed, "I did it because I posted my demands concerning the games, but the games didn't improve."

Firing Someone Today?

Probably not. That's a sneaky Friday job, eh boss? Anyway, here are four tips, courtesy of Wired,  to make the pain go away.

Paedos and Games: THE FULL EXPOSE!!!

For British tabloid hacks, the unholy marriage of videogames and paedophiles is great copy; it's like Lex Luthor and The Joker getting caught in the sack together. We are told that by using "Xbox", paedos can groom kids. (Well, uh, yeah, criminals can make use of any device that's connected to the Internet, dumb-asses.) Even so, anyone who's warning kids about this stuff is performing a positive service for society, even muckrakers in Fleet Street.

A Cabinet Made of Videogame Characters

Uh-oh. Rocco Cremonese had way too much time on his hands yesterday (didn't anyone tell him the Superbowl was on?) Anyway, he appears to have whittled away the hours by matching a videogame character with every post in the President's cabinet. So, Final Fantasy's Aeris Gainsborough gets to be Secretary of the Interior because "as a member of an ancient race, she makes perfect sense in her role to help promote and preserve the nation’s cultural history". I'm not saying it's good-funny, as such, but it is funny.

"Elite With Horses"

On a day when I trudged through two dozen ho-hum reviews for Killzone 2, I finally read something that's alive, only it's about a Turkish MMO. Here's Play This Thing on Mount and Blade, described as 'Elite with horses'. "Maybe I'm tapping into something fundamental about the human animal, but riding a bastard sword through a guy's neck is fucking satisfying. It's like the thwack of a Wii Tennis ball, the chime of a Tetris, the clink of gold coins being collected, the closing of a profitable trade; carnal base-hormones are triggered, edifying the beast, galvanizing the spine. This is core gameplay at its purest."