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.

Clint Hocking’s talks are always interesting, but this is a particularly fascinating one from the GDC 2011.

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Oh this? Just a film of landing on Mars.

PS. If you haven’t seen NASA’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” video, it’s worth checking out. Those folks are crazy.

Robert Yang (who I’ve mentioned here before) made such a good let’s play of the first room and corridor of Half-Life.

A “let’s play” is traditionally a narrated video of one or more people playing through a video game. Usually they are just to document the video game so that it can be experienced or understood without playing it, but some of the best ones are made by people who know the game inside out and are able to add some amount of context or commentary to the play-through, drawing the viewer’s attention to specific details and not getting side-tracked by any difficulty in progression. There are many great let’s plays on the Let’s Play Archive.

Robert Yang’s video is not really about the game as it is played, but about the design of the game from the perspective of a level designer. It was made for a let’s play event.

I don’t think he has plans to do more but I would listen to that guy talk about level design any time. A couple of the comments under his post of the video are worth reading too.

Conway’s Game of Life is a well-known cellular automaton in which, every tick, the state of each of the cells on a giant grid is determined only by the states of its immediate neighbours in the previous tick. Despite its extremely simple definition, it is famously Turing-complete, which is roughly to say that it can compute any computable function.

And so, of course, someone has written a Life emulator, in Life.

Perhaps it’s Life all the way down...

A while ago, Vi Hart (who I’ve mentioned before here as an author of the cool interactive essay Parable of the Polygons) made this fantastic short film about mathematics, meaning and music.

It’s really something special.

I love people making weird instruments out of weird things. Here’s an organ made out of a matrix of mechanical floppy drives.

You can read more about it on Ars Technica.

Vi Hart (who you may recall, I think is amazing) originally became known (to me) by her “doodling in math class” series of short films.

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A while ago I came across a widely-seen Youtube video about the history of the Amen breakbeat, which was a reposting of a recording of a 2004 documentary audio installation by artist Nate Harrison. It details the artist’s view of the rise of the break, as well as what this might tell us about the effects of intellectual property on cultural development.

Can I Get An Amen? — Nate Harrison (2004)

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

The Internet Archive is a real treasure trove.

Note: video contains immediate profanity.

This obviously isn’t mine, and my guess is it wasn’t made by this person either. (If you know the providence, please comment or contact!)

Speaking of Mario:

Thanks to Art House Politics for making me lol.

Check out this amazing video of Bob Hoskins clowning around on a blue-screen stage to do the Toon Town scene of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Early blue-screen cinema, I guess, so he doesn’t even really have props or sight guides to play off against.

I can’t remember where I saw this, possibly Important If True, back when that was a thing.

Just look at this. A cutting edge communications device from an alternative 1950. But designed and fabricated by a person on their workbench, like the raddest cyberpunk street tech.

The creator, Justine Haupt, actually sells them in kit form. But watching her guided build instruction video makes me think it’s a little beyond my skill level with a soldering iron.

Actually, this (hour long!) build video is really worth watching. Not only does it detail the creator’s design philosophy, she’s also really good at explaining the history of her design and the reasons behind many decisions.

Triple pendulums (pendula?) with slightly different starting conditions.

From this tweet.

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.

“Hair Flip (The End of Authentic Gestures)”
Mike Fleming, 2014.

Youtube channel Kiwami Japan has made a pure artform out of creating the same video again and again. In each, the silent protagonist creates a kitchen knife, from scratch, from an unconventional material. Here’s one made of smoke.

If you watch more than one, while the basic premiss is the same every time, they kind of subtly join together part ASMR, part unfolding surrealist world-building.