I am sure you already read somewhere about the Wolfire Humble Indie Game bundle. A whole bunch of great Indiegames for “Pay what you want”-price and DRM-free. The offer closes and slightly over million dollar were rised this way. Also two charity-oragnisations are supported by that amount of money raised (EFF and Child-Play), as well as the indie-developers itself. 4-color-rebellion wrote an interesting article about the money raised, the operating-split of the buyers, as well as piracy. About the piracy:

Well, over the past few days, Wolfire has seen 49.3 TB of raw downloads. The average user has downloaded about 490 MB of data (again, this is skewed by outliers – one user downloaded 10.3 GB). If you do some simple math, you find that there have been 105,497 downloaders. At the time that these numbers were released, there has been 79,000 paying customers. So, how about that? At least 25% of downloads of the Humble Indie Bundle have been by pirates (this doesn’t even include those that copied all of the games and mirrored them off-site).

Update: I just seen, that some of the titles are going to be released as open source: Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture.

Found the blog “Little-Scale” from Sebastian Tomczak, where he presens various experiments with sequencer, hardware and waveform-modulators. The combination of weird hardware, devices with a raw pixelated sound make them unique works, that got into my heart right from the start. A cool combination of old meets new, like a MIDI-Sequencer for the Sega Mage Drive or iPod Touch controlling a C64.

The Love-Toolbox

Love – an indie online multiplayer-game, that look absolutely cool! “Love” created something, I am still speechless about. It fits a style, I never seen before anywhere. Feels a little bit like walking through an impressionist-painting, with little dashes of magic runes, Myth and something like Monkey Island. The online-multiplayergame got also something more interesting. Beeing indie, resources are limited. You pay 10 Euros in advance for one month of play – but only a limited number of players is allowed to play the game. The world is constantly changing, though the building abilities from the players. Looks like a very interesting project, we should keep an eye on it. There is a fantastic widescreen introduction video available.

The reasoning about the business model also absolutely makes sense to me. I meanwhile see it like Eskil Steenberg (Quelsolaar) and really hope to see the death of the “low-end ad-market” soon, that makes you drive millions of page impressions on crappy websites – just to get half of you living cost. Quality is not about cent-money. Quality is here to stay.

(via tigsource)

Internet theory. Jim Killeen googled himself and visited people all over the world, that got the same name like him. The name became a tool – an orientation subset vast global network. (via)

Thanks Vague Terrain! Otherwise I hadn’t noticed the Glitch Studies Manifesto, Rosa Menkman released at the end of January 2010. The cool thing is, that you cannot only download that stuff as a pdf, bit I can also embed it here into my blog. So I do:

“The Glitch Studies Manifesto is now ready to be read and destroyed!”

Queue

Increpare Games has an interesting slogan: “Let’s try something out here…“. If you expect experimetal works now, than you are absolutely right! The stuff I tried so far on the site are explorations of narrative forms, somehow in between storytelling, classical writing and game interaction. If you got 10 minutes of time, checkout for example Queue.

Mixer – Strelka

Fil – Fil2

I recently found this cool Spectrum ZX fan website, with lots of content about the Spectrum ZX. This small homecomputer was quite successful in the early 80ies, and still today, we can learn something meaningful from it. For example “achieving more with less“.

Look at this gallery-page. It contains pictures from artists, mainly from Russia, Slovenia, Poland – some are very well executed. Due to the limited palette of the ZX (and the strange colors as well), the paintings strongly concentrate on lighting, instead of pure form or textures. Also look at this game-screenshots. Some gaming scene are made by one color + black! Totally pragmatic and ill looking as well. Definitely like it! (via)