Smartbomb

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art held a large public vote a few months ago to decide which games would be put on display as part of an upcoming exhibit called The Art of Video Games. The final results were announced this week, and are largely unsurprising! Five Mario games (if you count Donkey Kong), [...]

I’ve previously mentioned some of my views on gender inequalities in games and gaming culture. I thought I’d come back to the topic today, since there’s been a nice convergence of recent events on the subject – I can fill this article with links and make it look like I’ve got my finger on the [...]

In my game, the player is presented with a close-up view of a woman’s exposed chest, and must tap on her breasts to create a series of cuts around her nipples.

This year’s E3 will probably be remembered as the year that Microsoft and Sony launched their big counter-offensives against the Wii. Despite spending a great deal of money on developing and promoting both the 360 and PS3 as the hardcore gamer’s consoles of choice, both companies have now announced very big changes in direction for [...]

Browsing my RSS feed earlier this week, a story from Kotaku caught my eye – Faith Fighter Pulled By Creators After “Manufactured Controversy”. I first encountered Faith Fighter about 18 months ago, when my friend Judith showed me the creators’ website while preparing an essay on one of their other games. Why were people kicking [...]

Today’s issue of The Escapist features an article about the illusion of videogame interactivity. To quickly summarise it, the author begins by saying that games are differentiated from other art forms by their interactive nature, but then discusses how many emotionally moving games (the examples used are Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Metal Gear Solid [...]

When pushed, I usually say that my specialist field of game design lies in systems of interaction. One of the few subjects I found really interesting during my Economics degree was game theory, covering topics like contract design, social bargaining, signalling games, strategies for imperfect information, and so on. To really dig deep into the [...]

Towards the end of my dissertation period, one of the forums I’m on had a big discussion about hardcore and casual gaming. I kept meaning to write up my thoughts on the matter, but looming deadlines meant I never really had the time. More recently, I was asked to define hardcore and casual games and [...]

Among the comments to my post about scrolling shooters, John writes: Maybe with the alternate path system your talking about, you could change the path and rhythm of the game [...] Thats got the old rub of making loads of content that people wont see though. This reminded me of something I read recently that [...]

With work commitments out of the way, I’ve begin to devote more time to my ‘portfolio’. I have a few things planned, but top of the list in that I want to make a fun little 8-bit style game – something simple enough for me to wrap my head around, but with enough leeway to [...]