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 »
(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 »
Roo Reynolds, the man behind Lego is Full of Win, not only videoed my presentation ‘Brave n00b World’ at Interesting 08 but has Done Computers to it and made it available on the internest. Lo! I was originally going to call it ‘The World of the World of Warcraft’, but the Onion beat me to [...]
Filed under: conference, convention, fantasy, game design, game philosophy, geophysics, humour, mmorpg, playfulness, science, world of warcraft on June 25th, 2008 | 18 Comments »
Saturday was GameCamp, a one-day cross-disciplinary games conference in east London organised by the Guardian. Trust a broadsheet newspaper to fundamentally misunderstand what people do on a bank-holiday weekend. Anyway, 120 people invaded Sony’s 3Rooms venue in Shoreditch, and I forced my shiny new business card onto as many of them as possible. I have [...]
Filed under: ARG, conference, game design, game philosophy on May 6th, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I’ve been musing recently on the nature of courage, bravery and heroism, and their role in games and game-narrative. It’s been spurred by this photograph: Life magazine’s photograph of the week from October 1949. It was taken by an automatic camera on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, during trials of a [...]
Filed under: game design, game philosophy, narrative, personal, rpg on October 19th, 2007 | 15 Comments »