The most intersting thing to come out of E3 for me is this blog post by Jeremy Parish, on violence in games. He points out an important transition in a lot of violent games recently, from violence as a means to an end, to violence as revelry. I wouldn’t say it’s strictly confined to games [...]

Russell Davies says something important in this blog post and its very lucid follow-up. It relates to my concerns about a lot of pervasive apps, both in the real world and on the web: A great many things that have been trumpeted as game-like have actually proven to be quite dull. I’ve let this niggle [...]

Paul Mayze (COO of Monumental Games) and Mario Rizzo (Realtime Worlds‘ Business Development Manager) will be speaking at this year’s GameHorizon Conference at Centre For Life in Newcastle. The subject:
If online is the future of gaming, what does it take to be successful in this space? and how can you make the transition to online?
The [...]

NPR ran a piece the other day headlined with the abominably delicious pun “In Tough Economic Times, Video Games Console”
It’s a rather fluffy piece, but is a non-specialist press pointer to an important trend: Entertainment does well during times of recession, and games are growing much faster than any other form at the moment.
Boing Boing [...]

It’s been a sad week for UK game development, with NCsoft shutting the UK development studio and cancelling the unannounced MMO they were working on. The designers I knew working on the project are very sad, telling me only that it was an exciting project and they’re absolutely gutted to see it end.
There have been [...]

Ian Bogost has an article up on the newly relaunched EDGE Online (replacement for Next-Gen), talking about ideas of who gamers and what games are. He’s particularly cogent near the end:
When we acknowledge videogames as a medium, the notion of a monolithic games industry, which creates a few kinds of games for a few kinds [...]

The BBFC intend to launch a rating system for online games and films in just a few months, much faster than the two years or so stated to implement the full recommendations of the Byron review. It seems the BBFC are going to work with PEGI, and this TechRadar interview with BBFC chairman David Cook [...]

Gary Gygax was at GDC this year. Sadly, news comes via nearly everywhere that he just died. From Terra Nova:
May he rest in peace proudly as one of the very few people whose creations will outlive them.
(Edit: XKCD has done the sweetest tribute I’ve seen).
CC image: D&D circa 1970, mattdork

Reducing them to a total of 800 employees, they are axing 14 projects. No announcements as to which ones yet:
SCi announced its restructuring plans after suffering an £81.4m loss from operations in the six months to December 31, 2007, compared to a loss of £17.9m in the same period in 2006.

Pixel-Lab will next week effectively pack up and be off for 10 days to the States.  David & I will be attending GDC, the largest games industry conference, and are exited that as a company we will be there in force.
I am speaking at the IGDA Government & Associations Summit on the Monday, and at [...]