mssv

Adapted from my Mastodon thread from Dec 14, 2022, which was covered by GameDiscoverCo and PocketGamer.biz. With the news Apple is planning to support third-party App Stores to comply with EU regulations, I see we’re rehashing the old arguments about whether it’s a good thing. To be clear, I don’t only think it’s a good…

A couple of years ago, in the midst of COVID lockdowns, a Guardian story went viral: I’ve had the same supper for 10 years. The story was, if anything, more surprising than the clickbait headline. It was an account by Wilf Davies, a 72 year old farmer who’d barely left his Welsh farm’s valley, and…

2022 was the one of the busiest years of my life – even busier than 2021, when I sold my company, Six to Start, and wrote most of my book critiquing gamification, You’ve Been Played.  I’m still CEO at Six to Start. This year we continued expanding the company to more than double its pre-acquisition size…

Run down the list of last year’s top ten bestselling books in the UK and you’ll find ten books that were originally written in English. It’s the same for movies, though in fairness Parasite, from South Korea, just about squeaked into 2020’s top ten. Brits just don’t seem to be excited by fiction from other countries –…

Pity the poor awards voters. Yes, Elden Ring will surely win game of the year just about everywhere, but what about all the other categories? Anyone doing a halfway-decent job at judging this year’s best narrative game or the best debut game will still have to spend hundreds of hours to get through the longlist.…

Aftersun is a story about how we remember. It is also a story about a father and his daughter going on holiday in Turkey.  But it’s also a story about… well, that would be a spoiler. So please stop reading now if you haven’t seen this movie, as I don’t want to rob you of…

Back when “transmedia” was an innovative new term rather than a way to describe everything Marvel or Sony or Harry Potter does across movies, video games, and comics – in other words, about 15 years ago – there was a brief craze of “second screen” experiences to accompany TV dramas. As viewers watched the show, they’d…

My favourite weather app is WeatherPro, from Germany. It isn’t the prettiest – apps like Weathergraph have better widgets for the iPhone and Apple Watch – but in my experience it reflects the UK’s changeable weather best of all: If I look at the icons alone, today in Edinburgh is somewhat sunny, tomorrow is a…

Almost all of the games I’ve made over a fifteen year career are unavailable today. Of the dozens of mobile and web-based titles I’ve been involved in designing, some of which had millions of players, only three can still be installed. Games are an astonishingly ephemeral art form. Outside of a few devoted preservationists, most…

Review of Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John Thompson, originally published in The Author’s Spring 2022 issue. In 2007, Penguin commissioned the company I co-founded, Six to Start, to help its authors design stories that could only be told online. Previous storytelling experiments and marketing campaigns had used the internet, but chiefly…