There’s No Such Thing As Casual Gaming

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 [...]

Proper Art, Proper Artists

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

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]

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 [...]

Games of You

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

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!

Ron Moore's 'Virtuality' Webisodes

Following up to the kinds of fictions/new media narratives that I’ve been talking about, Ron D. Moore’s new television series Virtuality has released a series of webisodes.

The webisodes are presented as marketing/promos for a reality TV series called ‘Edge Of Never’– which is a reality TV series within Virtuality. It follows the lives of [...]

Interactive Fiction

I’ve been playing various hypertext adventures recently; there are some very good, slick, well-written ones out there. The most obvious example is Emily Short, the watchword on ‘literary’ IF. (Her blog’s a great resource on IF in general, with guides, recommendations and lots of cogent analysis of games, as well as some good info for [...]