In terms of film, the past decade has seen a lot of token interest in the games industry, with various directors producing turgid cash-ins on successful games.
Interest in games is now culturally entrenching though, as demonstrated by Guillermo del Toro in this interview:
How much influence do you think your gaming has had on your movies?
A [...]

Less than a month ago I blogged about Jon Burton of TT Games saying they’d like to make telly programs and possibly films.
It turns out that “further in the future” meant “about a month”, with Gamesindustry.biz breaking the story today that an animated short is to be made with the assets from Lego Batman. However, [...]

Tom Armitage has given a talk on games and social software entitled “Playing Together” at NLGD and also at Develop. We unfortunately missed it at the latter because we were running Games:EDU a couple of rooms away, but Tom has now posted text and images.
It’s a really broad ranging talk with some great thinking on [...]

The lingering death of E3 seems to be creating instability elsewhere, with European event organisers fighting it out to provide a better successor. As reported by MCV today, the MD of Gamescom organiser Kölnmesse is talking his show up, claiming it will replace Leipzig:
“It was to be expected that the Leipzig trade fair would try [...]

The most interesting thing I’ve read today is Gamasutra’s interview with Japanese outsourcing firm Tose. The company owns a little bit of IP, but the vast majority of work done in its 29 year history remains secret. The overall impression the anonymous interviewee gives is of a company that is humble, yet proud of the [...]

A furious commotion has developed in the past few days over game piracy. Since I posted about an indie developer’s efforts to talk to pirates, a file sharer has been ordered to pay £16,000 in damages and costs, and five publishers have announced combined legal action against 25,000 people.
It’s unlikely that many of these will [...]

Richard Bartle has weighed in on the current state of affairs between academia and the industry, talking about former polytechnics now being the best universities to get graduates from for the games industry, since they’re more willing to take risks.
the best undergraduate degrees for game development in the UK come from Abertay, Coventry, Derby, Nottingham [...]

Late last year was a season of highly polished AAA game releases, and the run out of summer this year seems to belong to interesting indie games. We’ve already had Braid and Echochrome, and upcoming is Flower.
Upcoming is also Webwars: EVE, which seems to be a casual take on CCP’s MMO, in which players compete [...]

Bruce Everiss posted this morning about the 360 apparently selling well in Japan:
So the effect of Tales of Vesperia will be to lift the 360 to a higher sustained level in the market. And at this higher level, because of word of mouth and peer pressure, there will be far more organic growth. It is [...]

Indie developer Cliff Harris posted a request for comments on his blog last week: “I want to know why people pirate my games. I honestly do.”, and the response is both fascinating and important. He’s collated the responses and his conclusions here. The whole thing is worth reading, but one of the most important things [...]