Posts filed under “video”

This is old, but it’s still absolutely fantastic.

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

I watched this interesting talk on game design by Jonathan “Braid” Blow and Marc “Miegakure” ten Bosch. They espouse and explore a particular design aesthetic where the designer essentially plays the role of a mathematician. “Good design” then becomes a selection of orthogonal mechanisms (axioms), and an exhaustive-yet-minimal mapping-out of what’s derivable (theorems), and then demarcation of the boundary. Since it needs to be fun, the real art has to come from crafting surprise and tweaking axioms to capture exactly what you want. They both make some very interesting points, and I thought this comparison with mathematics was a particularly cool and apt way to frame the ideas.

This aesthetic is particularly apparent in the examples they use in the talk, including Braid, VVVVVV, Ikaruga and the as-yet-unreleased Miegakure.

I invite you to watch this highly instructional film on dating from 1949.

The Internet Archive is a real treasure trove.

Every now and then when I find something online which I want to remember or show to somebody — usually an image or a video — I save it in a text file; one per person. Literally kilobytes of the stuff. And even more occasionally, I look back through those text files, and post something I find there on this site. (At this rate it’ll be the year 3888 before I get through it all.)

This is one such thing:

Grant Sanderson aka 3blue1brown has a wonderful channel on Youtube where he creates accessible yet deep educational maths videos. The are literally all very good, but the last two are a really great introduction to a topic in fractal geometry, and a demystification of the Mandelbrot set, presented with supreme clarity and fantastic visualisations. Probably requires high-school or first-year undergrad maths to really understand the technical content, but if you have interest in the topic I think you would get a lot out of this even if you have no formal education.

Telephone is a game in which participants whisper a phrase person-to-person, and see how it evolves as people guess at words they mishear.

The following music video for True Thrush takes this a step further, giving participants one shot to view and memorise a short video, before asking them to recreate it.

Telephone is entertaining because people’s natural automatic error correction (tendency to recognise and reproduce actual words) fights with the noisy communication channel of a quiet whisper. The True Thrush video is more about the unreliability of memory and creativity, and what details seem salient.