I went to a press viewing of two new exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier art gallery in Paris on Friday.

One was on MIT Media Lab professor and artist John Maeda, who makes computer generated imagery. Im not so sure it’s that interesting - a lot of it is essentially exquisite screen savers.

Rather more interesting was the exhibition of Ron Mueck’s hyper realistic sculptures. Their presence is incredibly disconcerting; their skin looks like it would be warm to the touch; their eyes look straight through you. It feels like you are intruding into whatever sombre thoughts they’re having.

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Psi-Ops is a strange game. It has one foot in dull American action videogame convention and the other in glorious sandbox, toy set invention. In other words, underneath the presentation, the anodyne action man picture on the box, the clodding intro movie, the plodding plot, there’s a lot of fun to be had with it.

It’s the first game I’ve played that features realistic physics as part of the gameplay (my PC doesn’t have the grunt for Half-Life 2, OK?). You play as a soldier (hence the guns) with psychic powers. You can throw things about using telekinesis, mind control enemy soldiers, blow their heads up and create walls of flame. All this takes place in a game world that gives you great latitude over how you accomplish tasks and fight.

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It’s compact neatness.
The springy give in the eject, reset and on/off buttons.
The light but positive click when the lid closes.
The silent stop of the lid when it fully opens.
The shape and size of the memory cards.
The quiet hum of the cooling fan.
The calm yet idiosyncratic sounds in the setup menus.
The easy interface of the setup menus and the way they gently move.
The startup animation.
That you can set the screen position for all games.
The little dots above the controller ports telling you which number each is.
The positive click when you plug in a controller.
The perfect give in the thumbsticks on the controller.
The big A button and its solid feel when you press it.
Its little game discs.
The speed of loading games.
The little busy buzzes and chugs it makes when reading the discs.

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My laptop is a complete waste of my time. It has so many exciting things on it that I rarely do anything on it other than dip briefly into a game (like the wonderful System Shock 2, downloaded off Home of the Underdogs recently) before somehow feeling the need to check something else out, like my email, or play half the first level of Super Mario World on an emulator, or check my web statistics, or look at a few photos, or change my desktop wallpaper, or watch the start of some video or other… And I come away, hours later, having not actually done or experienced anything to completion or gain.

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I recently finished The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. It’s a short book but it took me most of a year to finally complete. My cousin, Simon, recommended it when we went over to Canada last year. “Do you like footnotes?” he asked. I do, a lot. They were by far my favourite bits of Terry Pratchett books when I was little. “Then you’ll love it, and it’s all about design,” said Simon, and he gave me his copy. Sorry it’s taken so long to actually read it…

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Just a quick heads up on some non-icon work I’ve been doing recently. First is a piece for Orange on Second Life, and second a piece for Sony PSP on game trailers.

More coming soon…

Oh, it’s not mine but be sure to check Andrew Shankland’s great review of Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call on Pixelsurgeon too.

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Hooray – I’m feeling nice and righteous! A piece I wrote about the McLaren Technology Centre was quoted in Deyan Sudjic’s piece in the Observer on Sunday about the Stirling Prize. It was one of the ‘critics say’ quotes about each of the nominated projects: the one attributed to me was, “Part brand, part factory, part … vision of future environments.”

Trouble is that the ellipsis hides an important detail and changes the meaning somewhat. The quote is actually, “Part brand, part factory and part Ron Dennis’s vision of future working environments.”

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I went to see the press viewing of Rachel Whiteread’s new installation at Tate Modern this morning. It’s about 14000 white plastic boxes moulded from cardboard boxes, glued on top of each other in a series of huge, towering piles.

It’s fittingly monumental for the turbine hall, filling pretty much the entire back third. I like the way you can’t really see it if you enter from ramp on the lower floor. Whiteread says that she designed it to take into account the fact that most people enter at the upper entrance, so they’d get a bird’s eye view of it first.

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So Apple is once again at the mercy of the disgruntled hordes, this time for equipping its new iPod Nano with a fascia that scratches easily (oh, and there was a single batch (“1/10th of 1%” of all of them made, whatever that means) that the screen easily breaks on too).

Apple have suggested getting a cover to sort the scratches (which were available from third-party companies seemingly and incredibly days after the Nano was announced).

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Like most puzzle games, Lumines is hard to explain because it’s so abstract. It works in that cold reptilian bit of your brain that deals in instinct rather than words; the bit that guides your hand and foot in the dark to the banister and first step of the staircase at your parents’ house, even though you haven’t lived there for 10 years.

Having become halfway proficient at Lumines, I can’t yet see the end of my love of its challenge and the absolute absorption that it generates. Its setting of gameplay to a melding of musical and visual styles is original, imaginative and utterly mesmerising.

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