Category: Books
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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…
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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…
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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…
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"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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…






This is still an interesting read. But for me it was far simpler than this: The game’s narrative tries to…