better the mask

There’s No Such Thing As Casual Gaming

By better the mask ⋅ February 28, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

On Thursday, I went along to the Women in Games talk organised by WFTV. Lots of interesting points cropped up in the panel, which included Kim Blake from Blitz Studios and games-writer and journalist Rhianna Pratchett. The best parts of the conversation were about narrative and storytelling in games, and how the role of the [...]

Youtube Channel

By better the mask ⋅ February 15, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Clever people have pointed out that one of the issues with playing Unreal City is that the videos can be a bit small and fiddly. As a quick fix, and also because it’s probably long overdue, You Can Panic Now now has a youtube account where we will be posting the main chapter videos so [...]

This Unreal City

By better the mask ⋅ February 1, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Unreal City lives to tell the tale. It’s up in all its strange and surreal flash-mediated glory, so go, poke around, press some buttons, follow the origami unicorns and tell us what you think.
Congratulations to everyone involved in putting together this strange beast. We hope you like the outcome– more discussion on versions, transformations, game [...]

Unreal City Beta Launch

By better the mask ⋅ December 2, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

The beta of Unreal City’s chapter one “There’s A Crack In Everything” is up! And as you’re all lovely special people and pioneers, go have a look, mess about, and tell us what you think. The video still hasn’t had it’s final sound design pass, and doesn’t have any background music up but we’re keen [...]

Proper Art, Proper Artists

By better the mask ⋅ November 9, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I went to Playful 09, a day of cross disciplinary frolicking last week. A first set of thoughts sparked off from the discussions there…
Levelling Up
I think it was Duncan Gough that talked quite a lot about the continuum between games and films and television shows. There was a real sense through the conference, though, that [...]

Nothing New, Everything’s Borrowed

By better the mask ⋅ September 25, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Reading an article about the Prix Ars Electronica, which is the Oscars for digital art. It makes lots of nice points about object-based art, particularly the kind of art where the object and interaction interface itself is the content. Which means that the “art” can be taken out of the galleries and become a part [...]

Torchwood: Children of Earth [SPOILERS]

By better the mask ⋅ July 12, 2009 ⋅ 17 comments

Let me state, right off: this is the bravest, most thought-provoking, groundbreaking series of the year. It’s not even operating on the same level as the often silly, crowd-pleasing Doctor Who Specials. It has more in common with Battlestar Galactica, and even more than that in common with the British mini-series State of Play.
The [...]

Contacts

By better the mask ⋅ July 4, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

If you’re on Livejournal there’s a syndicated feed.
And similarly, here’s one for Dreamwidth users.

Games of You

By better the mask ⋅ July 3, 2009 ⋅ One comment

A recent article on Offworld claiming that Artificial People are the New Games got me thinking slightly tangentially about the kinds of claims it was making.
It’s the character of Milo that the article focuses on– Milo’s one of the possibilities Microsoft puts forward as a use for its Project Natal motion recognition system– and the [...]

Unreal City

By better the mask ⋅ July 1, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

If you’re here for updates or behind-the-scenes info about our multimedia adventure, Unreal City then you might want to start at the Unreal City Index. We’ve just launched, so there’s lots of juicy background info and game design thoughts to come!

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