Matt Jones presented at the Lift conference a short while ago, and his slides along with text are up on slideshare. I exhort you to take half an hour out to mulch through it. There are some amazing things in there, notably about architectural troublemakers Archigram, who were more or less four decades ahead of [...]

Duncan Fyfe is becoming an incredible games writer, and has recently been writing some very funny, short speculative pieces on games being as hip as music.
The worst thing about married life, Anthony discovered, was his keepsake photo of Dom and Maria from the Gears of War 2 limited edition and having to explain to his [...]

Cory Doctorow talks about one of his friends allowing his 13 year old son to play Call of Duty. It’s rated T for teen, so technically it’s fine for him, but like a lot of responsible parents his father worries about the content of what he’s playing. So, he’s stipulated that his son has to [...]

Duncan Gough is one of the minds behind PMOG, and certainly on the interesting fringe of MMO design rather than the flabby, World of Warcraft copying centre. Here, he talks about seasonal pricing models and free content, citing in particular an interesting comment from Valve:
“we’ve learned that we’re no longer making stand-alone games but creating [...]

The New Yorker has a profile of Cliff Blezinski, long time member and designer at Epic Games. It’s a long read, both detailed and insightful:
most game designers are not like CliffyB. But neither, really, is Bleszinski. The nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some “jock kid,” when he was a small, shy [...]

The evidence that games are generally not harmful to minors and may in fact be good for them is piling up. Here’s the juicy bit from this Guardian article on an EU report looking into videogames and kids:
A report from the European parliament concluded yesterday that computer games are good for children and teach them [...]

Locative computing is becoming more common and, in the process, more useful for games. Android has the Zombies, Run game, and once of my friends has already hacked together something inspired by Randall Monroe’s joke about cheap GPS using a netbook and a GPS module, and is now thinking of ways to use it in [...]

I enjoyed this Gamasutra feature article on cultural legitimacy for game developers. We’re in an odd time at the moment, where games seem to have skirted many hazards and come out on top in cultural terms. However, there’s still a long way to go before all the new media fears about them are quelled.
The [...]

Chris Totten’s Master’s Thesis in Architecture is about principles of game design used as principles of architectural design. I still want to see a paper about architecture for game deisgners, but this paper dealing with the inverse is still an interesting read, and Game Career Guide have published it in full.
One of the reasons I [...]

Via Kim, I paid some attention to Offworld’s retelling of some truly epic events happening in EVE Online. The MMO, often called “capitalism in space”, allows players to build and own immensely complex and large corporations made of other players. Large alliances often struggle for power. There is little narrative in comparison to the sheer [...]