Book Review: Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript

September 1, 2011
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I noticed early this morning that the book Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript has been released. Written by Mario Andres Pagella, and published by O’Reilly, I’ve been awaiting this book for some time. I instantly loaded it up on Safari (O’Reilly’s online reference library service) and began blasting through it, since some of [...]

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Outsider Videogames: my new monthly column at Paste Magazine

August 29, 2011

So remember a couple weeks back when I posted my GameLoop notes? They included notes on a session on “outsider games.” Well the sneaky reason I proposed that session was because I knew I’d be writing a monthly column for Paste Magazine on that very topic, and I wanted to get a better handle on [...]

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On finding women speakers for New Game

August 25, 2011

(Update Wed, Aug 31 2011: this post is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to share this content or adapt it in any non-commercial work as long as you attribute me as a source. See the license for more details.) Setting goals As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m directing New Game, [...]

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GameLoop 2011 notes

August 15, 2011

Every year for the last four years I have co-run (with Scott Macmillan) an unconference in Boston called GameLoop. It’s a self-organizing conference where there’s no set agenda: everyone shows up and figures out what to talk during a one-hour organizational session at the start of the day. I could write a whole post about how [...]

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New Game Conference: an HTML5 conference for game developers

July 7, 2011

I’m proud to announce that I’m directing New Game Conference, an HTML5 conference for game developers. It’ll be in San Francisco on November 1st and 2nd. The conference is presented by Bocoup with Google as our major partner/sponsor. Please keep an eye on the website and our Twitter feed for more info in the coming [...]

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How not to write a college essay about videogames

June 28, 2011

I’ve taught four or five courses in videogame development to college students. In my time I’ve seen some pretty terrible essays about videogames. This is partly due to the fact that kids graduating from American high schools generally don’t know how to write.  But I think critical/analytic videogame writing by college freshmen is bad in [...]

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Project: Objects that are enumerated in Graham Harman’s “Prince of Networks”

June 20, 2011

Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks is the most exciting book of philosophy I’ve read in a long, long time. Partly I find it exciting due to its prose style. I’m fascinated by the Whitmanesque enumeration of objects/actors/actants in the book, so I wrote a script to parse the original text for things that are probably [...]

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One of my favorite games is now for sale

June 10, 2011
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Vertex Dispenser goes on sale on Steam today for $8.99 for both PC and Mac (after a week the price will bump up to $9.99). Let me be clear: this is a game I dearly love. If you and I have remotely similar taste in games, I think you’ll enjoy it and you should probably [...]

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Embargoes: the enthusiast press is not special

June 1, 2011

Last night I read an opinion piece by a journalist for MCV UK complaining about stupid embargo tactics used by big game publishers. The gist of it is: Activision told a bunch of press about new Call of Duty information. As they usually do, they made the journalists sign NDAs saying “You don’t get to publish [...]

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Support this game: In Profundis

May 9, 2011
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In John Harris’ work-in-progress game In Profundis, you’re a lone adventurer with a few bucks to your name and one driving goal: explore a massive universe of procedurally generated star systems and planets, bring back valuable minerals and treasure, and claim your fortune. The game is sort of like Spelunky, but more strategic. It’s sort [...]

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