Month: October 2010

SVG Game Resources

Mozilla is holding an Open Web Games competition. I expect that many of the games will be use the Canvas API, since many programmers are more familiar with the imperative programming mode, and there are some games libraries that have been developed for Canvas or adapted from existing drawing or gaming libraries.

But I’m calling for SVG developers and designers to step up to the plate, as well. SVG has a lot of features that make it easier out of the box to build interfaces, animations, and even games. There is a scene graph, and the DOM event model that gives you free hit detection for pointer events, for example. And I’d love to see someone make an open-web game that’s both accessible and fun…

To help developers along, I thought I’d share a few free, open-source SVG resources that could be useful in building games:
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No Glee for Atheists

The theme of last week’s episode of Glee was religion and atheism. To their credit, they approached it playfully and even a bit irreverently, with Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young and one character making wishes on a Grilled Cheesus like it’s a djinni bottle. They even revealed that two of the characters on the show were atheists, which is an unusual and maybe even brave move, even if only as a plot device.

So, kudos to Glee for even raising the topic of atheism. It’s a topic that most shows, especially ones that take themselves more seriously, avoid like the plague. They even raised the problem of theodicy: if there really is a loving, merciful, all-powerful God, why is there such profound misery and suffering in this vale of tears? Maybe the lightness of the show in general let them risk pushing some buttons in this apparently very religious country. The episode was timely, too, on the heels of Pew Research Center’s recent U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, where atheists came out on top in knowledge of religion, and the atheist characters in the show certainly had the most eloquent refutations of religious faith.

So… that’s what I liked about it.

(Warning, spoiler alert!)
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