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I am an Explorer
Original Post: April 26, 2012 (Kotaku AU) Tracey is a body-builder. Mark is a rock climber. I am… neither of these things. *** My hands clutch the controller in a death-grip. My jaws ache from clenching. Sweat is beginning to rise from skin wrapped around my tense and tired muscles. I’m even past the yelling….
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Videogames, aggression, Anders Breivik – let’s not join the dots
Original Post: April 20, 2012 (The Conversation AU) “Violent videogames cause people to become violent in real life”. It’s a familiar refrain for anyone who has read a newspaper in the last 15 years. Today, the media reporting surrounding the trial of accused mass-murderer Anders Breivik has dusted off this old chestnut to explain a…
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Something about Draw Something
Original Post: April 7 2012 Everyone has been playing this game, from my parents to the most dedicated videogame critic I know—Draw Something. Though it may in the end turn out to be a flash in the pan, Zynga see some potential there, and have bought out the developer, OMGPOP. The thing that stands out…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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….
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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…
