User Profile

1) "Poetry may be playful in nature, but not all games feel poetic, and in my experience the videogames that feel most poetic are often those that have least in common with traditional games. My interest is not so much in considering poetry in light of play, but in considering (and making) videogames in light of poetry."

2) "Where fiction is concerned with what happens next, lyric poetry is concerned with what happens now."

3) "While we will be working toward a loose definition that might help us to identify and discuss 'game poems,' the point is not primarily to properly interpret or categorize these games, or get at their True Meaning, but rather to see if a close lyric reading can enhance our appreciation for any given game; whether considering these games as game poems can give us something to think about, something to talk about."

4) "Poetic address is one example of how lyric poems tend to exist in a kind of ritual space: they don't describe events so much as they exist to be events: to be performed and reperformed in what Muriel Rukeyser calls 'a ritual moment, a moment of proof.'"

5) "I have always thought of the game as a poem, and the original end-text as nothing more than a bit of context, but an explicit (and forced) indication of context always carries with it the danger of diminishing a poem's ambiguity and breaking the ritual moment on which lyric poetry tends to rely. [...] To illustrate my point: people have sometimes told me that Loneliness is a failure of a game because people cannot make sense of its central meaning without knowing the game's title."

6) "Following in the footsteps of literary theorist Stanley Fish, I would argue that categories like 'game poems' and 'digital poetry' are best thought of as related modes of paying attention rather than as objective taxonomical frameworks, and that every different mode of attention can offer us unique insights into the things we encounter."

7) "Conceived through the lens of lyric poetry that we have been utilizing, we might say that game poems are artifacts positioned as videogames that are short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic, are bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning (keeping in mind that, as in the case of lyric poetry, all of these characteristics are simply tendencies). We might summarize such a conception of game poems as 'videogames with lyric characteristics.'"

8) "From the videogame poet's standpoint, we might draw an analogy from a game's code to the ink that marks the page as a traditional poet writes down a poem on paper. The ink matters: it leaves a material trace that is relevant to the nature of poetry, and the words themselves cannot exist on the page without it; beyond this, the ink is deeply entangled with important questions of politics, economics, and ideology: where did it come from, how was it attained, what ideological structures are embedded with it on the page?"

9) "[From] the visual and auditory levels down to input mappings and operational logics, I seek to carve out new metaphors, recast established signifiers, and open avenues for new meaning. [...] Through this kind of use of explicit and shifting symbolism, I attempt to enrich and enliven depictions of squares in videogames."

10) "A blue circle moves across a blank screen, finds a sunflower, and the world turns yellow: bleep bleep. That's a game poem."

1) "Star Trek is often hailed for its prophetic dimensions, both anticipating technological 'innovation' and using allegory and optimistic visions of a utopian future to comment critically on war, racism, and capitalist inequality here and now. But Trek has almost always articulated this futurity through starships, explorers, and other images of mobility—and leaving places behind, as the late artist and critic John Berger observed, has a way of concealing consequences. DS9's stationary allegorical geography meant from the outset that it would be, as series writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe puts it, a 'show ... about consequences.' The series juxtaposes multiple clashing political, economic, and cultural perspectives embedded in a single contested place, one far from the glitz of the Enterprise or the manicured lawns of Starfleet Headquarters. It foregrounds contradictions between the Federation's comfortable core and its misunderstood and exploited Bajoran periphery, from the outside looking in. Instead of an itinerant spacecraft, this was a place where consequences would have to be, as Rodney King suggested, 'worked out.'"

2) "DS9's radical interventions also raise the question of place, and the role that local conflicts can play in global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. Attention to place is, perhaps understandably, dismissed in some corners of the political Left as sentimental, nostalgic, and reactionary. Place-based struggles, so the thinking goes, can never hope to defeat global systems of capitalist exploitation that are notoriously wily and adept at producing and taking advantage of differences across space. Challenging this view, the late geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are dynamic, capable of holding multiple identities and meanings, and defined through their specific material and cultural relationships to other places. Massey's work resonates with long-standing themes in many Indigenous cosmogonies. The late theologian Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, linked the priority of time over space in Western thought to the West's outsized role in environmental destruction, and to mass alienation in capitalist societies. These more complex views of place urge careful attention to context as a prerequisite for evaluating the politics of localized political struggles. They enable chapter 2 to affirm the progressive, emancipatory character of Bajoran anticolonial nationalisms and the Prophets' nod to theologies of liberation, and they enable A Different 'Trek' to evaluate the import of DS9's place-based intervention in Trek's hypermobile spatial epistemologies."

3) "Neither the script nor the novelization of 'Far Beyond the Stars' says much about Russell's time in the navy, where Black sailors faced a segregated division of labor, relegated to manual and service jobs, until 1944. But a brief exchange between Benny and Cassie in both texts in 1953 intimates that he began writing SF—'amateur stuff'—nearly fifteen years prior, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, while serving. At the beginning of Sisko's first extended vision as Russell, his interest in SF is met skeptically by a newspaper vendor (Aron Eisenberg/Nog), who prefers World War II films like From Here to Eternity. 'What's wrong with men from Mars?' Russell jocularly protests. He listens, both amused and uninterested, as the vendor gushes about Burt Lancaster's celluloid military heroics, and then silently hands the vendor a coin. Given Russell's experiences, is it not politically instructive that he would be more intrigued by 'men from Mars' than by reliving the wartime dramas of a white movie star? If not as openly seditious as draft resisters, we must take seriously Benny Russell's everyday, creative, 'amateurish' distractedness from harsh manual labor, his proneness to speculative fabulation, his susceptibility to dreams of 'otherwise possibilities,' including dreams of Black self-determination in the twenty-fourth century."

4) "More accustomed to the role of anticolonial freedom fighter than agent of a postcolonial state with which she often adamantly disagrees, Kira grows tremendously over DS9's seven years. She is often described as letting go of her anger, trauma, and Bajoran nationalism in a tidy liberal narrative of overcoming. Yet it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that Kira's politics and values don't change, but her heart does. Grounded in historical experience and insights from the Prophets, Kira remains in some sense a particularist—resolutely place based, religiously orthodox, fiercely anticolonial. But she becomes, in cultural studies scholar Ramzi Fawaz's felicitous phrase, 'a particularist with a heart for the universal,' making Bajoran experience a departure point for insight, empathy, and solidarity with a range of oppressed peoples. Kira models an alternative form of cosmopolitanism, one out of step with pretensions of liberal imperialist universality and replete with possibilities for international/interplanetary contact and comradeship."

5) "The decision to minimize Bajoran makeup requirements stems from producer Rick Berman's admiration for TNG actor Michelle Forbes, who portrayed Ensign Ro. Berman reportedly told Michael Westmore, the celebrated makeup supervisor on TNG and DS9, 'We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea shes from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.' Forbes, whose full name is Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo, is of English, Welsh, and Mexican American descent and has dark-brown hair, light-brown eyes, and fair skin. The point here is not to scrutinize Forbes, a brilliant actor and a refreshingly thoughtful Leftist voice in Hollywood's sea of inchoate liberals. Rather, it is to note that the Bajorans as we know and see them are a product of Berman's valuation of fair-skinned beauty, of his directive to make that beauty visible. Casting white actors in the roles of colonized peoples is by no means a problem unique to the Bajorans, DS9, or Star Trek. The whitewashing of anticolonial allegory is a defining crisis of mainstream American SF. International studies scholar Robert A. Saunders remarks that such a habit 'inverts the genuine threat that Euro-American imperialism has posed to the non-white people of the world.' Anthropologist John G. Russell argues that such racial camouflage in SF is a cynical move that protects writers and studios from both critiques of appropriation and right-wing reaction while cashing in on the palatability of whiteness with global audiences."

6) "Some critics see in the Dominion and its galaxy-ordering mission a purely racist social formation, devoid of any profit motive or other economic imperative. Yet as Gonzalez astutely observes, the Dominion's racism and its extractive economic logics are intimately intertwined. The very first mention of the Dominion comes in 'Rules of Acquisition,' which follows Ferengi attempts to expand 'synthehol' booze sales into the Gamma Quadrant. When Quark presses a trading partner for details about this mysterious 'Dominion,' she grows circumspect, counseling, 'Let's just say if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant, you have to do business with the Dominion.' When Bajor later signs a nonaggression pact with the Dominion to prevent a redux of the Cardassian Occupation, the Dominion isolates the planet from all external trade. And the Dominion war machine relies heavily on intensive resource extraction, notably for mineral ingredients for Ketracel-White, which directly informs its territorial interests. Even the Founders' gelatinous default state—their shape-shifting abilities—allegorizes not only the phantasmatic mobility of whiteness but that of capital as well."

7) "But if Odo is queer, he remains a queer of a particular, privileged sort. He is indeed alienated, cast out from home, the only one of his kind on the station—and yet the community from which he hails is one of extreme wealth and power, one whose persecutory anxieties authorize an ideology of race and class supremacy. What could it mean, then, for privileged queers like Odo to fail, or refuse, to reproduce the cultural and political logics of his 'own people'—especially if those logics are oppressive and cruel?"

8) "'Bar Association,' then, is a wonderful exception to Hassler-Forest's observation that Star Trek rarely fleshes out the democratizing implications of its postcapitalist premise. Ironically, refusing to follow Trek rules and simply banish money enabled DS9 to critique capitalism, in the twenty-fourth century and in the twentieth. Shimerman has praised the episode for addressing class contradictions that mainstream television often elides: 'People think of this as a comic episode. And it is, of course. But in truth, it's really about union-management problems. The irony of it is that I play management in the episode. So I thought that to make Rom have a reasonably hard job as a union organizer, I would have to be tough about it, to show the struggle to the audience. Although you don't see it on TV very often, this is something that goes on in America all the time.' Rather than some distant future in which technology smoothly outsources so-called 'repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor' to machines, 'Bar Association' critically reflects the rise of a service economy in the United States, returning us to the contradictions of our own world and the struggles to transform it."

9) "What is rightly hated in Trump, like what is hated in the Ferengi, in truth implicates a system that is bipartisan, to say the least. The very founding of the United States—a plantation economy fueled by kidnapped and coerced African labor and built on stolen Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous peoples—would seem to embody the 52nd Rule of Acquisition, itself a political theology of accumulation by dispossession: 'Never ask when you can take.' Likewise, the rise of a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States after World War II—a thoroughly bipartisan affair that has also militarized U.S. police departments—exemplifies the 35th Rule: 'War is good for business.' Faced with contemporary economic and public health crises, both major parties rush to take care of corporate donors and neglect the multiracial poor and working classes, heeding the 162nd Rule: 'Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.' These contradictions cannot be pinned on Trump, nor even on the Republican Party, alone. To suggest as much is to fetishize both Trump and the Ferengi, rather than heed the occasion for thoroughgoing critical reflection and more transformative political commitment that both offer."

10) "If there is a heroic, suffering O'Brien, then, perhaps it is the indispensable Professor Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien, first and foremost. As an engineer, Miles might keep the lights on at DS9, but it is Keiko who, consigned to the position of trailing spouse, champions efforts to collectivize social reproduction on the station, founding and defending the station school and welcoming Kira into her extended family as a brave experiment in collective kinship. Keiko produces scholarship on local botany in collaboration with Bajoran colleagues who are rebuilding agricultural and scientific infrastructure in the wake of the devastating Cardassian Occupation. She does all of this while raising her own children, pushing her husband to be a better person, and abiding the stress of routine threats to her husband's safety as a condition of his work. We only get glimpses of station life from Keiko O'Brien's perspective occasionally. But taking Keiko's geographies seriously challenges fantasies of a future that has automated away the 'low-skilled' work of social reproduction or 'innovated' away the political problems that surround racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Keiko's frustrations also offer a cautionary tale, suggesting that if the privatized, neoliberal family values of the 1990s remain the best that twenty-fourth-century humanity has to offer, the same crises of social reproduction and the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor will continue to fester, even in a 'postscarcity' Federation economy. In the decades since DS9 aired, this warning has certainly proven prescient. Rather than dismissing Professor O'Brien as 'annoying,' we might yet learn from her example, finding fairer ways to organize and distribute the joys and burdens of care work and fighting for that work to be valued and supported."

11) "Finally, as we saw in chapter 1, Garak is central to the events of 'In the Pale Moonlight,' carrying out the outsourced, illegal, and immoral dirty work of espionage, including murder, that Sisko cannot undertake himself. Garak is at once an enabling queer outsider to the Cardassian imperial family who eagerly serves its shady security state and an illiberal, enabling outsider to the Federation's liberal multicultural empire who abets it by carrying out the same sorts of unspeakable deeds. We might even read Garak's work for Sisko as a metaphor for the contemporary alliances between military multiculturalisms and neoconservative imperialisms, alliances increasingly embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party."

1) "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity–but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it."

2) "John is a physician, and PERHAPS–(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)–PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster."

3) "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off–the paper–in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

4) "There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,–the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to."

5) "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will."

1) "The connection we make between cycling and flying is metaphorical. You might even call it spiritual: an expression of the powerful feelings of freedom and exhilaration we experience when we ride bikes. But it is also a response to a physical fact. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are. When you ride a bicycle, you're airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. That floating feeling, that sensation of airy buoyancy, is heightened by the way the bike bears your body: your legs do the work of propelling the vehicle, but the job of supporting your body weight is outsourced to the bicycle itself. Today you can attach an inflatable saddle to your seat post and sit back on a pillow of air even as your bike's wheels turn on air. Perhaps you are riding down an empty road on a quiet night; maybe, like Johnnie Dunlop, like Elliott and E.T., you are riding on a night lit by a full moon. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound, either. You're in another world, an intermediary zone, gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky."

2) "A favorite slogan of bicycle activists goes: 'Two wheels good, four wheels bad.' It's a cheeky paraphrase of Orwell, but the motto smacks of sanctimony: the certainty that bikes are morally superior to cars, and that cyclists are nobler than motorists."

3) "The design was clever in several ways. Drais situated the saddle toward the rear of the frame, at a height low enough for the user's legs to reach the ground. On the other end of the Laufmaschine, Drais placed a padded rest for the forearms. This arrangement held the rider's body in an optimal position—back erect, torso slightly tilted forward—providing comfort and ensuring efficient movement. 'The instrument and the traveller are kept in equilibrio,' Drais noted in his first published description of the invention. He had hit upon the defining oddity of bicycle mechanics: the symbiosis between man and machine, between the bicycle and the rider who is also the power source. Drais's intuition about ergonomics was matched by an eye for aesthetics. The Laufmaschine was primitive by comparison with the bicycle as we have come to know it, lacking many key features, notably pedals. But its silhouette—the slender frame that loops on either end into wheels of equal size—is recognizably that of a bike. To behold the Laufmaschine in 1817 was to glimpse the future."

4) "There have been many innovations in bicycle design and construction since the arrival of the safety bike. Derailleurs, disc brakes, titanium and carbon-fiber frames—innumerable new components and building materials have appeared on the scene. Whole new genres of bikes have come into the world. There are collapsible bikes that fold on hinges so you can carry them around like a backpack or briefcase; there are bicycle designs that you can download on open-source websites and print out on a 3D printer. But the basic shape, the classic safety bicycle silhouette, remains and reigns. Lewis Mumford wrote: 'In every art there are forms so implicit in the process, so harmonious with the function, that they are, for practical purposes, 'eternal.'' Mumford had in mind such things as the safety pin and the drinking bowl, whose antiquity would seem to justify the heady designation 'eternal.' In historical terms, the bicycle is a new thing, but its form feels as fundamental and inviolable as any pin or bowl or Grecian urn."

5) "[Excerpt: The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 1896] The bicycle has appeared in a new role—that of destroyer of a once happy home. The woman in the case is Mrs. Elma J. Dennison [...who was] married to Charles H. Dennison in 1892. At that time she devoted herself to household duties which were soon increased by the arrival of two pretty children. Then, in an evil hour, Mr. Dennison presented his wife with a bicycle. Mr. Dennison says that his wife developed the bicycle fever to such a degree that she neglected everything her home, her children, and her husband. She lived only for her wheel, and on it. Soon she changed her bicycle for a man's wheel; then she discarded her skirts and adopted bloomers."

6) "As for his own cycling: he finds the kind of fulfillment on a bike that you might expect of an erstwhile aspiring monk. 'The feeling that you get when you're riding on the trail, alone in nature, surrounded by all those nature sounds, it is one of the greatest feelings you can ever have,' shering said. 'My happiness—my own personal GNH—is the mountain bike and the forest.'"

7) "The CEVIS [Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System] does not quite fulfill the old fantasy of bicycles in outer space. No one will mistake the pedaling astronaut for the nymphs in those old advertising posters, zigzagging their bikes through an obstacle course of moons and stars. But a spin on NASA's bicycle holds other wonders. Astronauts are often required to ride for ninety minutes at a stretch, during which time the space station passes over two sunrises, completing an orbit of Earth. At NASA they like to joke that the riders of its exercise bike are the fastest cyclists in history, capable of circling the globe in a single workout. ('Lance Armstrong, eat your heart out!' wrote the astronaut Ed Lu in a blog post.) A cyclist clicks his shoes into the CEVIS and goes wheeling above clouds, deserts, jungles, oceans full of islands and icebergs, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Newfoundland, New York, Antarctica, Africa, Asia crossing the heavens at 17,150 miles per hour, and going nowhere at all."

8) "There are two more bikes hanging from the ceiling in the garage: a yellow Fuji S10-S and a black Sekai 2500. These are the bicycles that Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe rode across America in the summer of 1976. BILL: Neither of us has been on those bikes in quite a number of years. I used mine for triathlons for a while, but it's not really a triathlon bike. It's a touring bike. BARB: We'll probably never ride them again, but I don't think we'd ever get rid of them. BILL: They're museum exhibits, you know? But I bet if I put in a little bit of work, they'd ride fine. They say if you treat it right, a bicycle will run for a hundred years."

9) "Boorish American car culture and incipient American fascism were natural allies."

1) "The Stamper brothers' talent had shined from an early age. Chris started tinkering with electronics as a young boy and eventually built his own computer in college. He got his first programming job—in arcade games—before he had even graduated. Meanwhile, Tim brought to the table an artistic eye and a knack for graphic design. Uncanny business sense combined with excellent creative instincts and big dreams had led the Stamper brothers to enormous success in their earliest days as a company, when they produced games under the trading name 'Ultimate Play the Game,' chosen because, in Tim's words, 'it was representative of our products: the ultimate games.' In May 1983, Ultimate's very first release—a 2D shooting platformer called Jetpac—hit it big on the ZX Spectrum home computer, selling 300,000 copies. Considering about one million people owned a Spectrum at the time, this was, in Chris's words, 'incredible penetration for a single product.' The Stampers worked insane hours to make this happen—eighteen-hour days, seven days per week. In fact, they only took off two days from work over the course of three years—both Christmas mornings."

2) "Brosnan's Bond was more technological than Dalton's or Craig's Bonds, and in GoldenEye, the bad guys weaponize information and surveillance technology, like Trevelyan's satellite or his security cameras in the bunker. It's no accident that you spend so much time in the game blowing up cameras and computers, the new enemies of the era. On the flipside, technical knowledge—like Natalya's computer expertise and the datathiefs and covert modems Bond uses to steal information in the game—proved particularly powerful in 1995. In this way, GoldenEye addressed concerns like, according to academic Martin Willis: 'What place is there for the human in an increasingly technological world? What power will technology wield in the future? What impact will global information and communication networks have on the continued prosperity of the nation-state?' Bond's bungee leap off the dam at the start of the film and game might as well be him diving into the unknown modern world. This tech dive persists until, in the final Brosnan film, Bond drives an invisible car like a superhero."

3) "Hollis told me that he based the delayed watch pause on the same four principles he always uses when making games: Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it self-consistent in the world of the game? and Is it fair?, meaning: 'When you die does it feel like it was your fault?' 'It doesn't have to seem fair straight away,' he told me. 'Sometimes I think it is okay if the player has to spend time and come to a realization that the game rule is fair. As one example, the random placement of the scientists in the gas plant push this rule a lot, but it is okay to play with the rules a little bit I think, and to worry the player on the hardest difficulty. The pause menu delay is highly unconventional, and is definitely pushing the issue of fairness. But once you know the rule, it does always feel like your fault when you die in that moment. You can imagine the game speaking to you softly, saying, 'You should not have paused then.'"

4) "The game's most controversial weapons weren't any of the powerful guns or the massive grenade launcher but rather the knives. The game's throwing knives inflicted a huge amount of damage in total silence and could be picked up and used again. 'We have throwing knives in the game because they're hilarious,' Doak told me, even though they aren't very Bondian per se. 'They were very nearly cut at the last moment because there was a tragic murder in Japan' involving a hunting knife, Doak added. The team received a fax from Nintendo asking them to take out the knives, arguing that a knife felt more offensive than a gun because it meant 'too much murder in the close distance'—an explanation that tickled the team. 'We just loved that phrase,' Doak told me, laughing. 'It became a phrase we would use. Murder in the far distance is great—knock yourself out all day long, but not murder in the close distance.'"

5) "The most famous of GoldenEye's scrapped design elements remains visible to players. The Dam mission is home to one of the game's most tantalizing mysteries—a distant island viewable through the sniper rifle's scope, impossible to get to but so seemingly intentional that it left a generation of gamers wondering. Botwood and Edmonds said they had originally been planning to add a boat that would allow you to get to the island to complete a mission objective. 'If I did it today I'd probably have a control for an open water outlet pipe that was blocking Bond's [bungee] jump there, so you'd have to go there to turn off the water,' Botwood speculated later. 'I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps when viewed from the island, so it was too much work.' Late in development, it was way more difficult to take something like the island out than to just leave it in, Hilton told me. Looking back on it now, Botwood considers the island a mistake. 'I should have never put it there,' he told me. 'It's a visual annoyance.' But messy things like the island add to GoldenEye's mythology—they add life to the world and give players something to theorize about, and are some of the best examples of the handcrafted quality of the game."

6) "The best example of how the team's inexperience benefited the final product is in their 'backwards' or 'anti' game design process. Today, much of the advice on FPS design says to start with objectives and work backward from there—tailor your level spaces to your objectives instead of building level architecture with no idea what will happen within that architecture. Instead, the team designed GoldenEye backwards—levels first and objectives second. When Hilton created the level spaces, he paid little to no attention to the player's starting place, exit point, mission objectives, or enemy location. All of that came later, with Doak and Botwood's work. 'The benefit of this sloppy, unplanned approach was that many of the levels in the game have a realistic and non-linear feel,' Hollis has said. 'There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level. This is an anti-game design approach, frankly. It is inefficient because much of the level is unnecessary to the gameplay. But it contributes to a greater sense of freedom, and also realism. And in turn this sense of freedom and realism contributed enormously to the success of the game.'"

7) "After the cheats and bonus levels were added and GoldenEye was tested and scoured for bugs, it went through 'lot check,' a two-week process of playing the game to death on various types of televisions. In these final days, testers reported back a fairly serious problem: on one of the levels, (probably Frigate), if you played it in a certain order, the characters would appear with awful-looking textures due to a glitch in the game's dynamic memory system. In a single day, Hollis had to make a few particularly clever last-minute hacks to the ROM that would get it working with as minimal a touch as possible to the game's code. With that final eleventh-hour adjustment made, and without recompiling anything, Hollis sent the ROM back to Nintendo. GoldenEye was finally finished."

8) "In the end, the reimagining's updates only reveal what made the original so special. The 2010 game's shift from 'slappers only' to 'melee only' 'is almost the same [as the original],' one reviewer noted, 'but perhaps not as hilarious at three in the morning with three other slightly inebriated chums.' GoldenEye's goofiness—its messiness, even—is lost in a game as slick as the 2010 GoldenEye. The Daniel Craig stunt double and martial arts expert who did all the 2010 game's motion-capture acting contrasted sharply with Duncan Botwood in a smelly suit getting beat up by sweet British nerds. But 'bigger' isn't always better. You can feel it as you play the two: the 2010 GoldenEye was created by a corporation, and GoldenEye by human beings."

1) [From "What Is/What If: The Beauty of Mystery, by Karen Lord] "Fiction is both process and mystery, knowledge and imagination. It lies somewhere on a spectrum that begins with poetry and ends with statistics. It is art. It takes the forms and shapes of the real world and re-views them with new perception: the shade, texture, and weight of the subconscious and the unreal."

2) "All of these approaches are valid, depending on context, and each can achieve interesting artistic effects."

3) "As indicated, each of these approaches can work, as long as they don't represent a failure of control or thought. So much depends on the proper execution of your intent."

4) [George RR Martin on magic] "[If] you're going to have magic in your story, you have to keep it magical, so to speak. This is a supernatural element. It doesn't follow the laws of nature. It doesn't follow any laws we understand. There's something frightening about it. This is the unknowable. I think magic should be handled that way. Magic should always remain a little mysterious and a little dangerous. [...] Don't just make it fake science."