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The INTERNET reacted with great anger and furious vengeance when we published Ben Richardson’s mixed-to-negative review of Dishonored. You know what? We felt a little bullied. But then! Penny Arcade said the exact same thing, in succinct, comic form. And then! Internet treasure Yahtzee agreed. So
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Michael Abbott has an essential post at Brainy Gamer today about the state of game writing as it relates to the experience of playing indie games. Game writing, he argues, has ossified into shorthand that does not capture what it is to play truly new-feeling games: What emerges is a stark and narrow
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Edge reports that digital versions of popular board games, created to serve the booming tablet audience, have greatly boosted sales: While the popularity of the boardgame has never been in question, the growing number of touchscreen enabled devices – and the broad market reach of those products – ha
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Sometimes it’s nice to imagine games as occupying the same space as literature. We’re not there yet, but we can do the next best thing with the red pen of revisionism. Author Ernest Hemingway had this to say about the nature of his craft in a 1934 issue of Esquire. I’ve “amended” Hemingway’s words o
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How do virtual dogs fit into the larger world of computer-canine interaction? Matt Novak over at Smithsonian has been doing a deep exegesis of The Jetsons because why not. On the introduction of Astro, the robot dog, Novak makes a salient point on why we need robotic pets in the future: In an effort
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Tevis Thompson, who wrote about his disillusionment with Zelda, and David Hellman, the artist of Braid, have teamed up to make a graphic novel about a young woman discovering the truth about her civilization, with an emphasis on suggestion rather than telling you exactly what’s happening. A universe
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Videogames, as we know, are a massive industry: According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and abo
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While we were thinking about how post-release developer layoffs may do more harm than good, Zynga was busy laying off most of their Austin-based studio. Ian Miles Cheong at Gameranx has the gorey details: We are told that the employees were given less than two hours to clear out their desks followin
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It’s no secret that videogame production is lacking in diversity, both in who makes games, and whom they are made for. A panel at Game Narrative Summit suggests that tackling this issue (as it relates to women) is more complicated than simply making a main character that is a strong, androgynous, ro
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The Internet contains too much information for any individual to read it all. One approach to this problem is to go on a “raw” information diet of reading actual bills in Congress and original scientific papers. It’s… an interesting idea rooted in the local slow food movement, and strikes me as kind
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A Google study of tablet use comes to some predictable conclusions: When U.S. tablet owners are playing games on their devices, they’re most likely sitting or lying down on a couch, according to a new Google study examining how consumers use tablets. The research paper, which seeks to provide an und
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Many major videogame companies go through a common development process: Developers staff up to make a huge game, then shed members once it ships because they no longer have anything for them to do. It happens again and again, whether the game is successful or not: Take-Two had a huge hit with Red D