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 [...]

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 [...]

The Internet is Like a Radioactive Spider, See

One of the big omissions in this blog so far has been me talking about my Mysterious Project– rather silly, as it’s what I spend the vast majority of my time thinking about these days. It’s a multimedia narrative, told online through a mixture of websites, short video-clips, audio messages, emails and images. It’s called [...]

Chuck Season 2 finale

Casey: Chuck me!
This episode of Chuck is potentially a series finale as well, depending on whether it gets renewed. In the meanwhile, we can only hope for more silly but endearing stunts on the part of the winsome cast. And yes, I did use the word “winsome” with little to no irony. If you have [...]

Sunday Media Roundup

It’s been far too long since I’ve done one of these, which means I’m going to have to be brief and selective about what I include here, as it would take far too much time to include the vast and frankly frightening quantities of media that I’ve consumed over the last few weeks.
Television

The Unusuals 1.01 [...]

Caprica

Official Promo Trailer / IMDB

The feature-length pilot for Caprica– Battlestar Galactica’s spinoff series set 50 years before the Fall– aired this week. I’m not sure whether I’m more excited that it’s a Battlestar spinoff or that Atia of the Julii (aka, Polly Walker) is one of the stars. It’s billed as a soap-opera about the [...]