I don't think resurrected zomboids should be marked white. White things tend to be indestructable, so it at first gives the idea they became indestructable, at least visually.

Mark them white.. AND make them indestructable!  Everybody wins.

This is what happens when you don't use definitions clearly.  If you're going to discuss whether something is a game, you must first be clear on what a game is.  Here are some possible definitions (they're a bit rough, but they'll serve my purposes here):

Game1: a competitive activity in which player(s) act in accordance with a set of rules, and win or lose based on skill or chance.

Game2: any interactive pastime.

There are other definitions (animals hunted for food?) which are not relevant here.  Both the above definitions are in common usage, but I think game1 is more common - game2 is mostly used to describe children's activities.  Obviously a game1 is a game2, and a game2 is not necessarily a game1.

So what is a videogame?  We can make two definitions videogame1 and videogame2 by adding to either of the above definitions the requirement that they be implemented on some kind of digital computer system.  So a videogame1 is a game1, a videogame2 is a game2, and by transitivity a videogame1 is a game2, but a videogame2 is not necessarily a game1.
Looking at examples of things generally called 'videogame' (Sims, Sim City, Second Life), videogame2 seems to be the 'correct' definition (i.e. the one that best describes common usage).

So once you've stated what definitions you're using ("videogame" = "interactive digital media", "game" = "interactive goal-oriented rule system"), there's really nothing more to discuss.  In this article he only states his definition of "videogame" at the very end, whereas it should be right at the front, and he doesn't state his definition of "game" at all (you have to deduce it from the other points he's making).  This happens a lot in these kinds of discussion, same with "are games art?"; everyone brings some slightly different definitions to the table, nobody states exactly what their definition is, and the discussion boils down to "my definition is different to yours".

On specific points:
(1) Using hacks to break rules is certainly possible in videogames.
(2) Videogames are not created from a total void; there are very real restrictions imposed by physics/biology/psychology, plus more imposed by technology.
(3) Part of the appeal of many board/card games is the look and feel of their components.  If Magic-the-Gathering cards had no art on them, it wouldn't be nearly as popular.  So videogames are not unique in this respect.
(4) Not sure what the point is supposed to be here.  If you're studying Poker, you're probably more interested in what happens during play than in the cards and chips sitting in a box in the cupboard.  No distinction here.
(5) So when I'm developing a videogame, and I replace my placeholder art with the final version, is it a different videogame?  Also, I'm reminded of a classic philosophical question.

But why my man has infinite lives? I just not feel that there are any consequences. Or there are some award if you finish the game without lost a life? Anyhow, the Wizard is though (compare to the another 8 level, which are easy). I can't beat him

Here I was just about to comment that I like having unlimited lives.  To me, this type of game is some light entertainment that I'll play once and never again.  Good fun while it lasts, but tedious if I start having to replay bits.  Sure, it means there are no long-term consequences to anything you do, and it would be horrible if all games were like that, but instant-death pixel-perfect platform games need it for me to bother with them.

So yeah, good work Sparky on the ubiquitous checkpoints and the unlimited lives.  The only bit I didn't like was the first stage of the endboss, where he gets reset every time you die.  Too unforgiving for me.  Maybe if you could take a few hits before dying.

I thought he was going on about how communication between the art, design and programming would be easier if the designers had experience in both, guess I was wrong.

Thinking that designers are there just for ideas is really shortsighted.  :D

I'll try to explain where he's coming from.  (And probably completely fail and get someone even more offended because I'm tired and have little time.  Yay!)

Basically, being a designer/programmer is a really powerful combo.  You can do your design work directly in code.  Why would you write your design document in any other language than a programming language?  Programming languages are specifically designed for precisely specifying procedures.  Perfect for writing game designs in, much more efficiently than natural languages.  For a designer/programmer, design and gameplay programming are the exact same process (you still have technical programming, which generally does not involve design work).  You come up with an idea, hammer out in code a possible implementation, compile it straight away and see how it works, iterate on it, etc.  Separating design and programming into different people makes this process really inefficient - the designer would have to communicate with the programmer how they want something to go, the programmer has to interpret that and implement it (inevitably putting their own slant on the design through the implementation; since gameplay programming IS game design really) then it has to go back to the designer, they have to try to see whether it's what they'd imagined, communicate back to the programmer.. much easier if these are combined into the same person.
So what you mainly do that is not programming is the "Coming up with ideas" part first.  That's the easiest part to separate from programming, so I can see where he thinks that would be what a non-programming designer does.  Because otherwise it's inefficient.  The designer has to specify processes anyway (probably imprecisely), then have them translated into code.

Also, latin for seed is semen. Doubt you'd want to use that. 

"Panspermia" would actually be quite appropriate, and has a good sound to it, but.. yeah.  Exogenesis has a similar meaning, I guess, but I don't like the sound so much.  I propose.. "Spore".

Probably due to Dyson (vacuum company) and they want to avoid conflict?

Bingo.

I don't think you should worry about this.  It would be unfortunate to change the name now that it's already well recognised - heck, it's even listed on the Wikipedia article for Dyson tree.  Most people (i.e. me) think first of the physicist when they hear Dyson, and that's a good reference.  And you couldn't really use Freeman because that name's already used in a game related context that people will think, which is far more relevant than some company in a completely different field.
It's someone's name, dammit. 

But if you have to change it:
Dyson Tree (surely safe?)
Yggdrasil
Xylem
Staroak

and 10 sets of hardware capable of running it.

and 10 sets of hardware capable of running it.

and 10 sets of hardware capable of running it.

what

Events are just one paradigm you can use to organise your code.  There's no absolute for when you "should" use any particular pattern, just different options you can choose.  If your code's getting messy, the problem is not that you are not using EVENTS in particular, it's that you don't know how to organise a large programming project.  The only way to learn this is to work on some projects, get into messes, and do better next time.  Paradigms like object-orientation and event-driven-ness will help with organisation, but they're not a magical cure for the messes you'll inevitably get into.

Also, don't be afraid to scrap everything you've done and start over if you think it'll be easier to clean up the design that way.  I've done it before and it's made things so much better.

well, if nobody solved it in four years, and a lot of people knew about it, that either means it's a puzzle that can't be solved through rational process (most likely) or that it can, but nobody did (less likely)

Plenty of problems have been open longer than four years, with lots of people knowing about them, and are still probably able to be solved rationally - plenty have been open for a long time and then solved.
Although, I too am unclear on what you mean by "rational process" here.  Please state definitions so discussion may continue.

Anyway, creativity doesn't need to be required for it to be used.  Many puzzles can be solved by brute force, but this tends to be a tedious and time-consuming approach, and people derive pleasure from solving them by shorter, more elegant methods.  It's easy to write a Sudoku solver, but some people still enjoy doing them by hand.  Computers play Chess by brute force and memorisation; humans play Chess by creative thought (and memorisation).

Nice, just played through the whole thing.  Really like the pathfinding AI and the tension that comes from having to pick up ammo regularly.

Seems like an odd kind of question, don't all ladders in games work exactly the same?

Certainly not!  There are ladders that let you move to the side (and fall off) while you're on them, and ladders that only let you go up or down.  There are ladders that are traversed in a single action, so you can't go back and forth while you're on them.  There are ladders that will let you jump repeatedly while on them, to climb up them faster, and ones that let you jump down to climb down them faster, and ones that don't let you do either of these.  There are ladders you have to be positioned exactly over to start climbing them, and others with a bit of leeway.  There are ladders that you automatically start climbing when you move into them.  And there are, best of all, buggy ladders that get you stuck half way up.  Ah, ladders.

I'm surprised Darwinia hasn't been mentioned here yet.

2d sprites, 3d world, looks awesome.  No animation, not camera-facing.  Screw realism, right?

I've heard neural nets are fairly good for this sort of thing.  Haven't tried it myself, but a friend of mine had a program that recognised hieroglyphs.

Love the adorable character art.

It's a smaller-scale RTS in the same kind of vein as Jonathan Mak's Gate88 - you're directly controlling a single powerful unit which you use to capture territory and make stuff, rather than giving orders to entire armies from on high.  There's a kind of 'puzzle' element too, involving the vertex colours.

And yes, Smestorp is the end boss.  It's actually in the video, you can see it being destroyed at the end.

True.  Somehow I missed seeing the sub-boards when I was scanning the list to see what seemed the most appropriate.  Moderator move it please?

I've put together a video of the game I'm developing; just thought I'd throw it out there for you all to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYEgimJVrs8

Sounds like you could do with a lower-risk project than game-development.  My approach so far has been to make stuff in my spare time while doing other things, and hope that when I've finished something decent I'll be able to sell enough to go full-time (or at least proper part-time) with game development.  If you're going to go full-on into it, you'll need money from somewhere.

Bead Sort is a hilarious algorithm for sorting positive integers in linear time.
You line up the numbers you want to sort, like so:

7 XXXXXXX
3 XXX
5 XXXXX
2 XX
1 X

Then apply gravity!

X
XXXXXXX
XXX
XXXXX
XX

X
XX
XXXXXXX
XXX
XXXXX

X
XX
XXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXX

X        -> 1
XX       -> 2
XXX      -> 3
XXXXX    -> 5
XXXXXXX  -> 7

And voila!  List of numbers is sorted!

Other things..
Antiobjects, I saw a cool pacman AI based on this, haven't tried using it myself.
Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing, this is just an amazing idea, watch the video.