London, 27th June—After much debate the shortlist for the seventh annual Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, covering the year 2006, has been announced. The Diana Jones Award is given to whatever the Diana Jones Committee believes has best demonstrated ‘excellence in gaming’ in the previous year. This year the committee has shortlisted three [...]
Filed under: awards, event, game design, rpg on June 29th, 2007 | No Comments »
Do you ever have that thing where you can remember a snippet of a lyric but you have no idea what the rest of the words are, or what the song was? I do too, but with me it’s folktales. If you can identify the folktales these two incidents come from, I would be profoundly [...]
Filed under: folklore, lazyweb, storytelling on June 21st, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Have a look at Prakbot. Take my word for it, it is unutterably cool. It may seem a bit techy, but what it boils down to is this: lately I’ve been playing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom, 1984) over Skype. They (Ben and Mind Candy) don’t seem to have released it into the wild yet, [...]
Filed under: online games, retro, text adventure on June 19th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I’ve spent the last week in the south of France, just outside Aix-en-Provence, drinking Banyuls and wondering why developers wait for a body to go on holiday before flooding him with emails. It’s been delightful apart from one evening when we were attacked by a scorpion in the house. We were in the kitchen when [...]
Filed under: AI, fantasy, game design, game philosophy, rpg on June 12th, 2007 | 5 Comments »
Not my usual post about games and design, but…. A lot’s been said about the just-unveiled logo for the London Olympics in 2012, most of it negative. I feel that it’s not been given a fair crack of the whip. It’s not as bad as people are saying. It’s much worse. Brand consultancy Wolff Olins [...]
Filed under: London, commercial, criticism, game design, graphic design, typography and layout on June 4th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Wired has suddenly got a bee under its bonnet about the idea that video games need a critical vocabulary before they can begin to be any good, or at least taken seriously. Annalee Newitz argues that film didn’t flower till the 1940s and it was the publication of French film-crit magazine Cahiers du Cinema in [...]
Filed under: criticism, game design, game philosophy, narrative, old media, rpg, storytelling, tabletop on June 2nd, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Spurred by a note from Gareth Hanrahan, I’ve been thinking about tracking down all the James Branch Cabell novels I’m missing. Cabell, for the uninitiated, is one of the greatest fantasy writers of the twentieth century. While Lovecraft and Howard were hanging out with Howard and Lovecraft, Cabell was hobnobbing with Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis [...]
Filed under: fantasy, fiction, history of games, mmorpg, old media, rpg, storytelling on June 2nd, 2007 | No Comments »