The Finnish national broadcasting company YLE recently broadcasted Rip! A remix manifesto. What an excellent, inspirational film! I think everyone on the planet should see this film before it's too late. In the spirit of the film, the makers have put the entire film online to be viewed and remixed.

Intro embedded here - view it now and check the rest on the websites linked above.

It seems that EU is about to vote on directives that might change some Internet access policies quite fundamentally. Most of the changes sound like things that have already been shot down local legislation level, so the lobbying corporations are now trying to pass the legislation through as directives.

Perhaps the scariest part of the proposal is that it gives ISPs open rights to change Internet connections to whitelist content available to users. Yes, not blacklisting inappropriate content, but whitelist a pre-defined set of services you're allowed to use. If this goes through and becomes the norm, we can kiss the Internet goodbye, especially given that the text in the directives that tries to guarantee citizens' right to create and distribute content have apparently been removed.

Some people are calling this trying to change the whole of Internet into operating on the classic TV broadcast model, where ISPs will start to offer you content packages similar to TV channel packages, where you have to pre-order websites you want to access. Sounds pretty scary.

There's more information available here, and I recommend you write and call your MEP, contact information of whom is available here. I'm ashamed to see the Finnish MEPs are in favor of the legislation, so time to contact them.

Atlassian software has a great deal available for 5 days - you can get a 5 person license to Jira and Confluence for $5!

I have experience of both products and think Jira is a grea issue tracker, and Confluence is a great enterprise wiki product. Both have their weak points (maybe biggest one being the fact the software is so flexible you can really shoot yourself in the foot by taking the customization too far), but I don't think there's better products in their class in the market. Even better, Atlassian folks are very pleasant to deal with and they're one of the most open companies in their communication to the customers, which I respect a great deal.

Best of all, the money made with the offer goes to charity! So, go get your licenses now!

Amazon just dropped me a new book, called Beyond Game Design: Nine steps towards creating better videogames. Based on my quick reading of the book, it looks like a good reference on the current industry thinking of how games ought to be constructed. So unless you're one of the designer types who reads everything available on games (as Richard Bartle discusses on page 119 of the book) and want an update on game design, I recommend you get a copy.

Of note, the fist chapter of the book, Understanding Emotions by Nicole Lazzarro which discusses the role of User Experience Design vs Player Experience Design seems to a useful tool when discussing design prioritization in the future.

Looking at the bleeding edge of game design research, Jesper Juul argued in this year's GDC just a few weeks ago that the classic flow model presented in page 13 is actually not correct. He had data to support that instead of keeping players in the flow channel all the time, good games make players fail occasionally, which in turn leads to players enjoying the game more. His slides are available online, so go read those too. :)