“It is inevitable that at this stage in my PhD – the dreaded writing-up phase – I can see the blasted thing everywhere. I can’t eat, sleep or play without some tenuous and convoluted association with social networks, social psychology and online community interrupting the few moments I’m trying to clear my head of it. This ranges from creating mini-networks out of peas and spaghetti on my dinner plate to dreaming of correlations in my sleep. The worst is when it creeps into my fun time and turns every game I play into an exercise in theory. Take, for example, the multi-award-winning World of Goo. On the surface, it’s a fun little puzzler. The aim is to create a structure out of creatures with different properties: green nodes can be reused many times, so you pluck them from one part of the network and use them to branch off in another direction …” (more)
[Aleks Krotoski, Guardian, 16 April]