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  1. Sven's avatar
  2. Unknown's avatar

    I’m one of the author’s in the 2022 opdc (didn’t win anything, still trying to bear up under the shame…

  3. Arya's avatar
  4. Max Clark's avatar
  5. Kfix's avatar

    Thank you for this very interesting collection, and for wrestling with the obviously mixed feelings on this anniversary. And thank…

Category: Books

  • SHOOTER in StoryBundle

    A few months ago I was honored to be invited by Reid McCarter (@reidmccarter) and Patrick Lindsey (@HanFreakinSolo) to contribute the foreward to an anthology they were editing called Shooter. It's a collection of essays about first-person shooters and their place and relevance within the larger context of media and culture. The fifteen chapters are contributed…

  • First We Take Manhattan…

    A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece about Fumito Ueda, and his games Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a good piece, and one that I am extremely happy to see running in such a prestigious publication with an audience broader than the audience for most writing-about-games. The piece quotes me…

  • Far Cry 2 Map Editing Guide

    Wow – two posts in a row about books that I contributed to – albiet this one is only indirectly as I didn't actually write anything for it. A few months ago, Ubisoft announced that they would be facilitating the creation of a map editing guide to be written entirely by the Far Cry 2…

  • Well Played 1.0

    A few years ago, I was invited down to Carnegie Mellon by Jesse Schell to visit the Entertainment Technology Center. While there, I met Drew Davidson who is currently the Director of the ETC. This past year, Drew has been hard at work trying to trick a bunch of us slacker game developers, bloggers academics and others…

  • In Sid We Trust

    "You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world." Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world. I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time…

  • On Authorship in Games

    Not that long ago, famed film critic Roger Ebert stated that games are not, and indeed, cannot be, art. Recently, following up on a response made by author/game convergence guy Clive Barker at the Hollywood And Games Summit, Ebert clarified his claims. Ebert’s basic argument is that art requires authorship, and that games abdicate authorship…

  • Understanding Games (by proxy)

    Finally got around to reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and surprise, surprise – it’s no surprise why so many people in the game industry talk about this book. I was a pretty big comic book geek in my youth, but the eighties and the nineties were a long, dark time for popular commercial comics, and…

  • A psychopath, a fascist, a rapist and God walk into a bar…

    Last week some of us were chatting at work and Alan Moore’s Watchmen came up in conversation. I realized then that although I had read it several times, I had never owned my own copy. Five years ago, while packing my stuff to move from Vancouver to Montreal, I realized that the copy on my…

  • Incompleteness, Uncertainty, Relativity and the Universe

    Been a month of heavy reading for me with two books of tremendous and mind-bending scope. First was Simon Singh’s latest ‘The Big Bang’. I’m a huge fan of his sort of ‘popularized history of science’ kind of writing. His first book ‘Fermat’s Enigma’ floored me with its engaging histories of insane mathematicians from Pythagoras…

  • Zero Sum Zanshin and the Tao of Low Strong

    So I haven’t posted in about a week because my free time has been pretty much obliverated, but I had to get on here and post my thoughts on David Sirlin’s book Becoming the Champion. This is not a book I would have picked up on my own, and the only reason I read it…