Smartbomb

A number of people are quite upset about Titan Studios’ upcoming cake-fest Fat Princess. Of course, speaking out against the games industry led to a rabid counter-attack by angry teenage gamers who feel like their way of life is under fire, and all that’s left of the ‘debate’ is a smoking crater of locked comment [...]

I love E3. For as long as my internet connection has permitted, I have made a point of settling down in a comfy chair and watching live streams of the major press conferences every summer. I was even going to concoct an elaborate plan to blag my way into last year’s show, but then there [...]

On the 27th of March, Dr Tanya Byron delivered a report to the government entitled “Safer Children in a Digital World”, which dealt with issues of child safety on the internet, and regarding videogames. The ‘games’ side of her report concluded that the current system of games classification in the UK is far too confusing. [...]

I usually have quite a lot to say about gender in games, so it was one of the first things my friends suggested I wrote about on my blog. I thought it over for a few weeks, but kept coming back to the same conclusion: I can’t write about gender in games, because I am [...]

I have become slightly obsessed with cocktail cabinets. I think it’s because I’m planning on getting a place of my own, soon – my mind is reaching out for things to decorate my future house with. Really, a cocktail cab would probably be a bit too impractical for my living room, but that hasn’t stopped [...]

I wrote an essay about game genre definitions as part of my coursework, and I would now be perfectly happy to never hear the term mentioned again. After some intense research into genre studies itself, it has become clear that genre descriptions themselves are fairly meaningless. Genres evolve as part of an ongoing negotiation between [...]