Talin’s Index of Essays

Talin

4 min readAug 20, 2018

Diverse topics including computer games, politics, philosophy and science fiction.

Autobiographical Essays

Covering my 25 years in the computer game industry, my time at Google and Electronic arts, and much more…

USAF: 1976–1980

People are often surprised when they learn that I served in the military. The popular mental image of a soldier — lean…

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The Faery Tale Adventure: A personal history

The Faery Tale Adventure was a computer game that I created for the Amiga in 1987. It was moderately popular for it’s…

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Music-X

Music-X was the name of a popular Midi sequencer program that I created for the Commodore Amiga in 1988 and which was…

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Inherit The Earth: Quest for the Orb

1993 — 1994

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The History of Faery Tale Adventure 2

This article is the second installment in a series describing the history of the computer game The Faery Tale…

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Four Failures: 1996–2002

Most of the autobiographical essays that I have written so far have been about successful enterprises, or at very…

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Maxis and EA: 2002–2007

An unemployed game programmer walks into a bar…

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Real Names and not-so-real

This is the story of how I helped with the repeal of Google’s “Real Names” policy.

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Faery Tale Adventure 3?

This is part three of a series on the history of the computer game, The Faery Tale Adventure. Here is part one and part…

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Computer Game Development

Storytelling in Open World Games, Part 2

Writing Character Dialogue

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Storytelling in Open World Games

A Writer’s Guide

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Common Misconceptions about Computer Game Design

Although I no longer design computer games for a living, I was a game developer for 25 years, starting at around 1983…

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More Game Development Misconceptions

My recent essay, Common Misconceptions about Computer Game Design, turned out to be much more popular than I would have…

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Kingdoms of Darkness and Light

A look inside the creative process of designing a game

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Games with Heart

Designing interactive experiences that elicit emotion

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Technical Content

Articles intended for an engineering audience.

Engineering Insights

There’s a lot more to the craft of software engineering than just the ability to code. In fact, I would say that the…

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The Rise and Fall of Object Oriented Programming

No, object-oriented programming (OOP) is not dead. But it is significantly less ubiquitous than it used to be.

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That Which Must Not Be Named

Maximizing source code readability in software development

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The technology behind Vortex: A real-time, browser-based, seamless texture generator

Vortex is a web-based program for generating seamlessly tileable textures for 3D modeling and games. It is entirely…

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Should the Amiga be revived?

Every few years, we hear a story in the tech news about how some company is going to resurrect the Amiga computer, and…

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The Big Reset

Computer technology needs to start over — from scratch

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Python PEP Retrospective

This is the story of how I ended up becoming the author of four Python PEPs, all of which were successfully approved…

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Why Math?

I was recently asked by a friend who is tutoring a young student if I could provide an explanation of why they needed…

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Politics and Philosophy

Opinions on a variety of topics.

Sex Education for a Young Cyborg

Why are human romantic relationships so complex?

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Unconscious Conspiracies

Or, how powerful people get away with doing bad stuff.

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The Richest Man in Hell

The Richest Man in Hell lives in a steel fortress with armored glass windows, surrounded by barbed wire. Private…

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Open Letter to a Supervillain

Hi,

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A brief history of the Neutral Net

A historical perspective on the importance of Network Neutrality

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Science Fiction: A Literature of the Gaps

Fans of science fiction have a somewhat well-deserved reputation for nit-picking. Debates of the subtle meaning and…

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My Grandfather’s Watch: A novel approach to an ancient paradox.

This is my grandfather’s gold pocket watch, the one he carried into battle in World War I. Of course, it has repaired a…

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Unbelievable

Today I want to talk about belief, and in particular, the moral consequences of belief.

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Armed Societies

“An armed society is a polite society.” — from the novel Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein.

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An alliance between humans and AIs

Science fiction authors have been telling tales about robots and computers since long before they were available to the…

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Why I’m A Liberal

I wasn’t always a liberal. Truth be told, if you’d asked me thirty years ago what political party I identified with…

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The Real Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

There’s been a number of stories in the news about the “threat” of artificial intelligence, and a lot of it is…

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Random

Idea: An Open Source Construction Toy

I’ve always enjoyed building things, even when I was a child. One of my clearest memories of childhood is the long…

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Book and Film Reviews

Lord of the Rings trilogy: a retrospective

I recently re-watched the director’s cuts of all three of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. While I like…

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Last and First Men / Star Maker

When asked to name authors of “early” (before WWII) science fiction, most people can only come up with two names: Jules…

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