"Where is all the good writing about games?"
By the mid 1970’s, Rock & Roll sounded nothing like the energetic blues-inspired pop songs after which the genre was named. The soundscape was now made up of concept albums, rock operas, synthesizers and 30 minute ballads. The music was elaborate and…
In a recent post at his blog The Inbetween, Mike Nowak bemoans the gap between intent and action which appears when game controls are more than usually complicated. Nowak notes that the unwieldy button combos in the Street Fighter series would seem unacceptable…
Alex Raymond, of the While !Finished blog at the Iris Gaming Network, explains how games have established a rather simplistic view of relationships in her post “Women Aren’t Vending Machines: How Video Games Perpetuate the Commodity Model of Sex“: What the vast…
Soren Johnson discusses a number of lessons he learned from Sid Meier during his time at Firaxis. All four observations are good, but the third and fourth are especially resonant for me. Calls for thematic simplicity and “show, don’t tell” have grown…
Last week saw the ‘Framework’ conference in Melbourne, and Kotaku Editor David Wildgoose attended a lecture given by Chris Avellone – he of Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 fame. In a nice recap, Wildgoose talks about…
Sure, it’s about a board game, and a forgettable one at that, but Greg Costikyan makes a point that it’s important to know about the history behind even bad or un-interesting games: For what godforsaken reason are we featuring Twiggy Game today?…
This will be the second time I’ve linked to something involving Anna Anthropy (a.k.a Aunti Pixelante), but I think she’s got a particularly different take on games and play than what we usually hear. I feel this (too short) interview highlights some…
Jim Rossignol, Editor of RPS and writer-extraordinare, wrote a fitting farewell tribute to the late JG Ballard on Offworld today. In it, Rossignol eloquently examines Ballard’s effect not only on his own creativity, but on that of contemporary culture and the consumerist…
Recently, Amazon.com purchased one of the larger game portals, Reflexive Arcade. As part of the integration, Amazon chose to lower the prices on all the casual arcade games to $9.99. This angered publishers , causing PopCap and others to pull their games…
Chris at The Artful Gamer writes about the recently released browser-based game ‘Legends of Zork’. He examines it from the perspective of someone who played the original as well as stepping into the shoes of a newcomer to the ‘Zork’ universe and…