-
Azeroth from the Outside
Original Post: February 16, 2012 (Kotaku AU) The view of the Earth from the moon fascinated me — a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance. — Frank Borman, Apollo…
-
Bending Time in Skyrim
Original Post: December 20 2011 (Games.on.Net) Time is a strange thing in videogames, especially in open-world RPG type simulations such as Bethesda’s Skyrim. A fair amount of scholarship has been undertaken examining time in games (Juul and Eskelinen are a good place to start, if you’re interested) although these tend toward explaining time with regard…
-
The Australian Videogame Industry
Original Post: October 19 2011 The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this,…
-
Age of Empires: Pay to Play
Original Post: August 26, 2011 (GameSpy) Free-to-play, social, online — these three terms have, for me, defined a slew of insipid, frustrating experiences that resemble reinstalling Windows or downloading a series of patches as much as anything I’d call a “game.” The core mechanic is of setting a series of timers, then waiting. And waiting….
-
Sustaining Content Providers, redux
Original Post: August 10 2011 I wrote an article over a year ago in response to Ars Technica openly discussing their dilemma regarding generating cashflow. Theirs is the same problem faced by many, if not all, commercial websites providing media content. I am inspired to bump that article again here, as the problems have come…
-
R18+ and Managing Information
Original Post: July 22 2011 So this is a knee-jerk response post to the R18+ discussions at today’s meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys General in Australia. While the reporting on this issue is likely to be all over the usual outlets (GameSpot.com.au, Kotaku.com.au, ABC’s Tech site and it seems likely the Laura Parker…
-
Sabatoging an Open World
Original Post: July 1, 2011 I remember the moment with crystalline clarity, both emotionally and critically. As it unfolded, it confirmed for me something I’d long suspected about open world games. There I was, en route to a mission, following the orders of an NPC. His initials were in gold letters, so I knew his…
-
Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? So I Don’t Have To…
Original Post: June 28 2011 (Kotaku AU) Early this morning the United States Supreme Court finally judged that Video Games were a form of speech, therefore deserving of protection under the First Amendment. In Australia, video games, or any form of media for that matter, are not granted the same rights. Adam Ruch, as an…
Looking for something?
Latest Articles
Get in Touch
