Microsoft have just announced a deal with Sky, to bring TV to the Xbox 360 in the UK. There was grumbling over here when they started streaming netflix in the US, and it seems they’ve been quietly building the capacity to plug the XBox into various TV networks via the net.
It’s been pretty obvious that [...]

Brenda Brathwaite writes for the Escapist on making the transition from more than two decades of game development to teaching, and addresses many of the prejudices that game developers have against academics. It’s an excellent and somewhat provocative article that cuts through some of the issues we see recurrently at Games:EDU.
As nice as it is [...]

A couple of weeks ago I attended Futuresonic in Manchester. It had many interesting speakers, and some not so good ones, but overall the impression I took away was an idea about where tech conferences are at right now.
One of the most stunning presentations I saw there was Aaron Koblin’s, on data visualisation. There are [...]

I suspect there are quite a few companies rushing to develop Augmented Reality titles for the DS at the moment, and Ghostwire has just been announced. Players will hunt ghosts and set them to rest by looking at the real world through their DS camera.
One of the commenters on the Kotaku story asks “Will this [...]

Valve are setting an excellent example of how to update games at the moment, by making the updates into entertainment themselves rather than mere patches.
Last week they unveiled an update to the sniper class in Team Fortress 2, which seemed to completely negate spies, the counter to snipers. Knowing full well that such an update [...]

At GDC this year, Eskil Steenberg presented on the procedural tools he’s been developing, and they were quite amazing. He also said “fire your game designer” near the beginning of the session, and I think he’s dead wrong about that. Designers are absolutely necessary, because users lack insight and make bad decisions.
Elder Game have posted [...]

Shockingly, the interim Digital Britain report entirely excludes the games industry. For something that wants to ‘secure the UK’s digital future’, that’s a pretty glaring omission. While the games industry certainly isn’t recession proof as some claimed late last year, it’s proving very resilient and still growing when other sectors are shrinking even faster.
While [...]

Jason Della Rocca recently stepped down as Executive Director of the IGDA, and is going into consulting. In a conspicuous break from the most commonly voiced opinions on tax breaks, he argues the case against campaigning for them at The Escapist.
I saw Jason voice this last summer during the panel at Develop he mentions, and [...]

I don’t know what to say about this, but can’t just let it pass. Rarely, some youtube comments are spot on:
This is cringe worthy.. i feel ill :(
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/rollseyes…
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I was expecting “Giz a tax break” at the end.

A couple of things have really impressed and amused me recently. One is this walkthrough for IKEA, presented just like a text walkthrough for a game. Another is the rather clever GDC text adventure made for GameSetWatch.
Having lost work to proprietary file formats in the past, plain text is quite important to me. It’s very [...]