The third Hide & Seek Weekender is kicking off in a couple of days, and should be fantastic. Three more days of brilliant, gorgeous and eccentric social, street and pervasive games, in and around the South Bank. I’ve been privy to a lot of the plans and preparations—Spaaace has been sharing office-space with Hide & [...]
Filed under: game design, rpg, street games on July 7th, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Two years ago the Guardian hosted a most unusual one-day conference, Gamecamp, in east London. It was an exceptional day—I wrote about it here—with a lot of brilliant and fascinating people bringing together some very different experiences and expertise about games and gaming. There was also a pre-release copy of Rock Band, which was good, [...]
Filed under: conference, game design, game philosophy, real world on March 8th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
In which I attempt to define the games equivalent of Turing-completeness, with reference to the work of Roger Caillois.
Filed under: game design, game philosophy, history of games, playfulness on February 11th, 2010 | 14 Comments »
Another brief update—hold onto your swearing, I’m preparing a good, fruity rant about the deficiencies of Fallout 3 (if the avatar has a frigging torch then surely it would be a good idea to tell the player instead of letting them run around in the frigging dark? Also, I have had it with games that [...]
Filed under: 2009, academia, education, game design, workshop on February 11th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the Difference Engine no.3 edition) is now available for download exclusively from e23, the digital warehouse of Steve Jackson Games. This is the revised and expanded facsimile version of the game that I’ve been blathering about for the last two years, and which is finally seeing the light of [...]
Filed under: cake, casual games, game design, history of games, humour, magnum opus press, storytelling, tabletop on August 5th, 2008 | 7 Comments »
(This is the fourth part of an ongoing series of skientific infestigations into the physics, chemistry and biology of Azeroth, the world known as ‘of Warcraft’. This will probably be gibberish unless you have read part 1, part 2 and part 3 first.) The ecology of Azeroth, part 2 The strangest aspect of the animal [...]
Filed under: fantasy, game design, game philosophy, game theology, geophysics, mmorpg, online games, playfulness, rpg, science, world of warcraft on July 11th, 2008 | 10 Comments »
(This entry is the third part of a continuing quasi-scientific investigation into the nature of Azeroth, the world better known as “of Warcraft”. Here we move on from geophysics to study the local ecology. Part 1 and Part 2 of the series are still online.) The ecology of Azeroth is perplexing. In addition to the [...]
Filed under: environment, fantasy, game design, game philosophy, game theology, geophysics, humour, mmorpg, playfulness, science, world of warcraft on July 8th, 2008 | 10 Comments »
If you’ve been commenting to my last few blog posts on the World of Warcraft, or you have a scientific hypothesis of your own about the nature of Azeroth and how it came to be that way, or you have too much time on your hands and enjoy thinking about stuff that doesn’t make sense, [...]
Filed under: fantasy, game design, game philosophy, geek culture, geophysics, google, humour, information use, meme, mmorpg, online games, playfulness, science, storytelling, world of warcraft on July 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
(This is a continuation of the essay started here and synopsised on video here.) I note that my previous post has sparked some academic debate in certain circles relating to the validity of my research techniques and data. Therefore before we embark into a new area of discussion, I must address some of the comments [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized, environment, fantasy, fiction, game design, game philosophy, geek culture, geophysics, humour, information use, mmorpg, playfulness, science, space, world of warcraft on July 3rd, 2008 | 26 Comments »
The text that made up my Interesting 08 talk ‘Brave n00b World’ was part of a much longer document that I’ve been working on for a while. I’m not sure it’s ready for primetime—I’m not sure it’s ready for anything—but to catch the tide of interest in the video, here’s the first part of it. This [...]
Filed under: environment, fantasy, game design, game philosophy, geek culture, geophysics, humour, mmorpg, playfulness, real world, science, world of warcraft on June 30th, 2008 | 76 Comments »