This week, I started listening to A Life Well Wasted, which is an excellent podcast on games culture. Robert Ashley records, hosts, edits and scores each episode, and supports it by selling a limited edition prints to go with each one. He seems to have an extraordinary knack for tracking down and interviewing interesting people [...]

I have few words for this. Vincent Ocasla has taken Sim City 3000 to an extreme of experimentation and expression, in creating Magnasanti. Vice have an interview on it here.
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, [...]

I still meet people who ask me, perplexed look on their fizzogs: “Channel 4 are publishing games? Why?”. Here’s why, in a Gamasutra piece examining Adult Swim and Channel 4’s forays into games so far. It’s worked excellently for them, and excellently for games too, with them taking on smaller projects and different topics.
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Clint Hocking nails it as far as morality in games is concerned:
When canned, discrete moral choices are rendered in games with such simplicity and lack of humanity, the message we are sending is not the message specific to the content in question (the message in the canned content might be quite beautiful – but it’s [...]

I’ve heard from one XBLIG developer that any game making three hundred sales there is doing very well relative to most. Brandon Boyer goes into quite some detail on Boing Boing about what Microsoft promised at launch and what they’ve actually done, finding a somewhat depressing result. There’s clearly some commitment from Microsoft when they’re [...]

What if game publishers, like some music publishers often have done, spun out smaller labels tp publish indie games? Brian Baglow from Denki asks more or less just that on their company blog, and it’s a very interesting thought. Surely, as indie games become more popular and players become more accustomed to smaller, cheaper games [...]

MP Tom Watson is in the games news today for more games industry coordination. Shadow Minister Ed Vaizey has also been criticising government support of the industry for a while too.
Say what you like about the tax breaks debate, and governments that are inevitably on the way out too, but this kind of vocal support [...]

By far one of the most intersting things I saw at GDC this year was a 5 minute talk by Frank Lantz, on the premise that games are not media, we just assume they are because they come in the same physical forms. Instead, he argues that games follow from a millennia long history of [...]

2009 is truly shaping up to be the year of indies, with the emergence of new distribution channels completely changing people’s expectations of what a game is, how much it should cost, and how it can be delivered. There’s been a cultural love of indie games for a decade or more; it’s something I’ve frequently [...]

Develop have a full report from NESTA looking into cultural tax breaks for the games industry. This is the most comprehensive case yet for them, going much deeper than the “give us money” demands that it gets boiled down to and going into the likely effect that such a measure would have in studios and [...]