Category: general

Royal Tasks: Responsive Kanban/Trello/Jira on plain web hosting

Now for something completely different. I am interested in tools and in moving away from tech giants. I was frustrated that existing open source Kanban/Trello/Jira alternatives either required complex/expensive installation or had dull interfaces. So I rolled my own!

Announcing Royal Tasks, a modern and responsive Kanban tool that runs on normal web hosting (PHP/MySQL). Here, I’ve worked to make cards and checklists feel like physical objects that respond immediately.

You can optionally encrypt boards with End-to-End-Encryption.

Download and installation guides here:
https://github.com/RealRules/royal-tasks

PS. And yes, I have used “modern tools” for development. We are all trying to work out what that does and what it means.

 

Will start blogging again

How it happened: I used to use this blog to post what I did, promote interesting things I saw, and comment on the world in general.

Then most people stopped using RSS readers, and discussions and comments moved to social media, where we are at the mercy of algorithms, discussion only happens in small groups, and history disappears quickly.

So I will start blogging again.

Question: How to make people aware of new posts? Are there RSS reader holdouts? Would you be interested in getting emails when I post something?

The Consoles that wouldn’t die

Remember when the current console generation was being launched, and there was a widespread idea, also shared by me, that the PS4, Xbox One and Wii U were going to fail in the face of tablets, mobile phones, indie games, and all? That the new generation was a “prayer to stop time“?

And many articles on “Why consoles gaming is dying“, “Consoles are dying“?

And yet here we are. Ars Technica has an article comparing sales across console generations, with the current generation doing much better than the previous one, on a quarter-to-quarter basis.

Console sales

I suspect that the story was that many critics, myself included, were personally jaded by console hardware, and much more interested in indie and experimental games than in the latest military shooter. But our sentiments just weren’t widely that shared. People still want new games on new hardware, even if they only look marginally better than those of the previous generation. The PS4 is slick, and the share button is worth paying for. You also buy a new console because that is where the games are going to be.

Also, cloud gaming never took off (and I suspect it won’t due to latency issues).

Yes, you can be wrong.

PS. And Super Mario Maker is also an exhilarating experience.

Speaking at MIT Monday the 27th

Monday I am speaking at Nick Montfort’s very nice Purple Blurb lecture series at MIT.

Jesper Juul on developing video games to develop video game theory

October 27, 6pm, 14N-233
Juul is a video game theorist and author of Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (MIT Press, 2006). He is also a video game developer, and will discuss using lessons from developing online and casual games to inform work with video game theory (and vice versa). Juul is currently a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; he works at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Speaking at Indiana University, Georgia Tech

Indiana University

12:30-1:45 pm on Friday, March 28, 2008
Indiana University Bloomington, Dept. of Telecommunications, Room RTV 226

Talk: Games for Making Friends and Enemies: A Small Theory of Games in Social Contexts.

It is easy to forget that before the single player video game, most video games were for more than one player. In this work in progress talk, I will argue that many of the more successful multiplayer games, from Parcheesi to Rock Band to Animal Crossing acquire their power by piggybacking on existing social relations, thus acquiring many layers of meaning when played, as well as ambiguously threatening to rewrite these relations. By use of digital and non-digital examples, I will outline a theory of how games acquire meaning from the context in which they are played.

Georgia Tech

Monday, March 31st
TSRB 132
1:30-2:30 pm

Talk: Hardcore players of casual games: Locating the “casual” in casual games.

Casual games are usually described as relaxing games to be played for short periods of time, but studies have shown that many players of casual games play more than 10 hours a week. In essence, it seems that casual players play in “hardcore” ways. In this talk I will discuss the problematic distinction between “hardcore” and “casual” players by examining the new field of casual games and answering the question: Should we talk about casual games or casual players?