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 [...]

Gamasutra have posted my favorite feature from Game Developer Magazine this year: Dirty Coding Tricks. It’s a collection of excellent and hilarious stories of how developers have saved games from sinking. I am overjoyed to see it in a non-dead-tree format. Go read, now.
(CC image by i_gallagher)

In 2005, the BBC did some research into who plays games in the UK, and the results were good for the time: even compensating for age groups not included in the research by assuming noone in those brackets plays, and excluding people who play some form of game less than once a week, 40% of [...]

There’s a lot of talk of Quake Live “failing” at the moment, since it’s been revealed that ad revenues from the free to play game just aren’t covering its costs. However, it’s important to see that iD are experimenting with something new; some degree of failure is to be expected, and iD have announced that [...]

Deed to inspire many words yesterday, with the announcement of a £6.3M fund to place 50 PhD students at some of the foremost game development studios in the UK (Website: www.digital-entertainment.org).
This is a massive win for the UK games industry and academia alike, with the industry having an opportunity to pass knowledge of vocational skills [...]

Ed Vaizey calling for TIGA and ELSPA to merge and form a single trade association. I can see his point in terms of recognition and simplicity for policy makers, but can you imagine both working under one name and efficiently setting priorities?
While there’s a lot they have in common, there are still a great [...]

Via Marek Bronstring, I saw this post about writing for games, which attacks a recent Guardian piece about why novel writers should be moving into game development. I normally like pieces by the Gamesblog crew, but that article is really an oddity that deserves to be taken apart.
Screenwriting is a profession in it’s own right. [...]

This is a really interesting nugget about the “discussion” on violent games: It seems to be cyclical and in decline. David McCandless of Information is Beautiful fed the term “violent video games” into Google Insights, and found peaks every November and April:

April is the anniversary of Columbine, though from this data it’s of course impossible [...]

This week, I received some bizarrely contradictory emails purporting to be from the IGDA. They point to a worrying rift between the membership and the board of directors, and while many sources have indicated this for weeks, these emails are the clearest sign I’ve seen of it.
The first was an email calling for 10% of [...]

Less than a month ago since people were voicing doubts about games companies staying in Prince Edward Island. Now we see what’s quite possibly the beginning of a new round of funding and tax breaks, with Ontario announcing a new fund for technology companies in the province.
How long do you need to assist businesses for [...]