Mssv

The vision: Eager teens, listening quietly and attentively as I led a discussion about alternate reality games.
The reality: Thirty seconds into my prepared spiel, there were four hands waving in the air and the kids at the back were already talking. “Oh boy,” I thought, hoping to make a quantum leap out of here, but […]

I love all the stories in We Tell Stories, but I do have favourites. Back when we were planning the six week schedule for the stories, we decided to structure it like an album - start with a bang, and end with a bang.
The first story was The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming. It was […]

In the highly interesting New York Times Magazine article about play (of which I’m sure I’ll write more on later), there was a fascinating section about ‘false endpoints’:
Through play, an individual avoids what he called the lure of ‘‘false endpoints,’’ a problem-solving style more typical of harried adults than of playful youngsters. False endpoints are […]

In a lecture that Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario, Zelda, Nintendogs, etc) gave to Toyko University in 2003, he talked about how he gets a game completed:
First you have to decide what to complete the game around. “This is what the game’s about!” You have to fish out the core, the fun part of the […]

…or not.
There’s an interesting article on the New York Times about the recent blossoming of internet comedy, partly thanks to the Writer’s Guild of America strike (will it continue after it ends, I wonder?). In it, there’s an interesting quote:
“I love it when people say, ‘I want to make a viral video,’ because it’s like […]

I was so impressed with the first two minutes of Mass Effect, the new sci-fi RPG for the Xbox 360, that I had to play through it twice and then show everyone at work. While it’s essentially nothing but an extended cutscene, it’s a beautiful, well-directed, well-paced and astonishingly atmospheric introduction to the game. If […]

Unfortunately I’m going to have to disappoint you - I’m not actually going to write a review of Puzzle Quest here; there are plenty of good ones already out there. The one thing I will say is that the game ended far earlier than I imagined - it comes with a large, scrollable world map, […]

A brief roundup of things I have watched, read and played over the Christmas period:
Ratatouille
Ratatouille is in contention for my ‘most rewatchable movie’ award. This has previously been the sole province of Master and Commander, another movie that doesn’t adhere to normal traditions of pacing and plotting. I’ve watched Ratatouille about four times now (at […]

Over the course of history, scientists and philosophers (who, until recently, were essentially the same thing) tended to interpret the universe - and, interestingly, the human brain - through the lens of their era’s technology. During the Renaissance, the universe was thought to operate like a clock, mechanistically and predictably. Later, during the Victorian and […]

One of the most memorable children’s TV shows of my generation was Knightmare. Ah, Knightmare - a show that was about role-playing games, but oddly cool to be a fan of. In Knightmare, a team of four kids would try to get through a dungeon populated by all sorts of traps, baddies and dangers.
Of course, […]