I love maps. And I really love this – Google Maps annotated with Flickr photographs taken at those locations. That’s where we live – there are even pictures taken at the pub down the road.

I generally hesitate at the prospect of “convergence”, because mixing ideas together often ends up in compromising them. But sometimes mixing creates a kind of technological poetry, like the joining of a mobile phone with a camera. And this joining of Google Maps and Flickr is one of those poetic moments.

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Do videogamers, among enthusiast groups, have a disproportionately large interest in the business behind their interest?

Do car fans obsess over every new business decision made by Volvo or Mercedes? Do gardeners get excited about the latest compost trade show in Los Angeles?

I really don’t know, but what I do know is that videogamers are absolutely fascinated by the business of games, much as their analysis of it is often uninformed, misreported, narrowminded and partisan.

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Boing Boing have blogged a recent book from design consultancy IDEO called Thoughtless Acts. It’s basically a collection of photographs that show how people unconciously use and interact with elements in the environment – from using the top of a square post to place a square milk carton to using a window as a mirror. It’s a project that Naoto Fukasawa, a Japanese industrial designer that I recently interviewed, has taken pictures for – he calls the concept “affordance”: these things in the environment “afford” us certain unconscious actions.

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Just wanted to say how much I like using Warp Records’ Bleep online MP3 shop. Not only is it easy to use and cheap, it’s easy on the eye and the sound quality of the music is so much better than that from iTunes. The number of independent labels that are available from it is expanding all the time (the big guys other than Warp themselves I guess would be Ninja Tune and One Little Indian), so take a look.

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I met up with a friend, Nik Roope, tonight to see and talk about a project he’s been working on for a while – the Hulger phone.

Hulger is a full production model of the Pokia phone. Pokia was a project in which he converted second-hand old-fashioned phone receivers so you could plug them into a mobile phone and sold them on eBay. Nik has designed and made (in China) 11,000 Hulgers (he had to change the name when Nokia took exception to “Pokia”), and they’ll be launched next week.

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E3 is over for another year and I’m feeling something more than the usual sense of anticlimax at the fact that I won’t get to see any of these exciting new things for a year or more.

This year I’m feeling ennui. Yeah, Sony and Microsoft have shown their new consoles, but I don’t believe the (meaningless) performance statistics or that the videos and pictures are properly real in-game shots. Besides, I haven’t had enough of my Gamecube – Resident Evil 4 shows it has a lot more to give. Yeah, hundreds of new games have been announced, but I feel pretty much nothing for most of them (excepting Zelda, new 2D Mario on DS, Odama (bizarre pinball/war strategy), Okami (dog in brushstroke graphics action from Clover Studios), Katamari Damacy 2 (that may actually be KD1 in the link by the way)).

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icon 011 I went to Amsterdam for the day with a regular photographer, David Levene, to do this one. It went pretty well and I’m pretty pleased with the piece, but I recently heard that Wanders was a little upset about it – he felt that it made him sound arrogant. Gratifyingly, however, the introduction to the International Design Yearbook #20 seemed to like it: “Alex Wiltshire summed him up perfectly in his article for Icon magazine in April 2004”. Nice.

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My girlfriend began her maternity leave from work on Friday and one of her leaving presents was Yoshi Touch and Go for the Nintendo DS. She loves it, single-mindedly playing it over and over again in a delicious cacophony of sparkling sound effects.

Though it looks like a platform game, Yoshi Touch and Go is not divided into many different levels, rather four different play modes: two with randomly-generated play areas, two with short pre-set ones. You have to protect Yoshi as he walks from left to right on the screen by drawing clouds (onto the touch screen) to provide walkways over hazards, fire eggs at them, or remove enemies or gather items by drawing rings around them. You’ll be trying to help Yoshi survive for as long as possible, trying to win as many coins as possible, trying to get him through as fast as you can, or a combination of all three – it’s all about getting the best score or time.

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And another one’s been announced.

Following the news of EA’s upcoming Godfather videogame, Majesco are making a game of Taxi Driver.

“Nominated for four Academy Awards, Taxi Driver remains one of the most iconoclastic films of our time… We look forward to developing a game that remains true to the spirit and style of the movie, and embodies a total entertainment experience.” (via Idle Thumbs

Why? And how? What can a videogame do that in any way can compliment the complex social and emotional dramas that characterise those two films? Can’t we trust videogames to do their own thing?

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One of these images is real and the other is computer rendered.

And I’m not totally sure which is which… Here are more:

They were listed here (link courtesy of ntsc-uk forums). I immediately assumed they were some sort of joke but reckon now that they’re kosher because further down the page are screenshots of wire frames.

See, realistic representations of the mundane can be spectacular!

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