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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Mass Effect Contingency and Canon
Original Post: May 30 2011 In another in a series of pieces discussing largely unanswerable questions, this piece will examine the relevance of the ‘canon’ to an interactive form such as Mass Effect. The background to this discussion is the overall controversy regarding sex in videogames, and why it is such a difficult subject to…
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A Series of Interesting Choices
Original Post: May 18 2011 (Kotaku AU) Kaiden or Ashley? Rescue or Harvest? How do you make decisions in video games? Video games were described by Sid Meier as ‘a series of interesting choices.’ Indeed, many good video games today involve choices that go beyond which gun to use or how fast to run through…
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