I like to have instant access to articles and opinions and cool stuff; that’s why I have many collection sites among my bookmarks. One can be seen in the link to the right: Qatfish, a great resource for independent game developer blogs. For more AAA-directed game development news, Gamasutra is awesome as well. Slashdot is also nice – because of the varied articles posted there; not because of the strange mix of rabid, infantile and thought-provoking comments. When it comes to cool stuff and humour I mostly visit Swedish sites like Buzz and Ollo.net. But I’m a regular reader of Something Awful as well. All in all, I’m very fond of sites that collect large masses of information/pictures/articles/opinions/etc and supply some form of user-defined ranking of the material. I don’t agree with the decision most of the time, but it’s still nice to get a quick-and-dirty summary of what others have found interesting. (I know that Ollo.net and Slashdot and Gamasutra technically don’t have a ranking system, but they’re pretty strict about what goes up there so it works anyway. And Something Awful doesn’t even have that, but it’s still full of great stuff amidst the crap.)

As a contrast to the sites with plethora (you know, I even used the word plethora in my CS thesis; there’s no end to my pretentiousness) of information from various people, I also like productive people who put their stuff online. Stuart Campbell has a great site called World of Stuart, for example. (Go read it now! His humour is brilliant. Read the short about page there if you don’t know who Mr. Campbell is.) Then there are people like Chad Austin who have awesome projects and interesting thoughts as well.

This is starting to sound like a praise post for the Internet. “Oh look, all these wonderful things to read supplied by all these wonderful people! I think I’ll go kiss the Internet’s ass a bit more!” There’s a downside to all of this as well: if you can’t decide what information is valid and which isn’t (and under what circumstances!), you’re going to get pretty screwed. I know that everyone is aware of this, but I saw something that really made me chuckle and made me want to reiterate this warning. It’s a very graphic example from the new article collection site devbump, aimed at supplying game developers with (I quote) cool game development stuff:

The image screws up the display… Dammit. So here’s a link instead:

http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/misc/in-game-ads.jpg

I think T. S. Eliot was one of the modernist writers/philosophers who claimed that there are no absolutes – that for every statement you could always find a viewpoint from which a statement is true. That idea has probably never held as much truth as right now, in our age of rampantly spreading information and opinions.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Games, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.