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guardian and observer

  • [Games Theory] Watch out, weberati – Austin is game crazy

    Sunday April 19, 2009 @ 12:24 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 19 March 2009

    South by Southwest is not a computer games conference, or so I’ve been told. The annual festival in Austin, Texas, is supposed to be the folly of web geeks, that brand of brainiacs who make (or want to make) Facebook and Twitter, rather than the breed responsible for Halo or Grand Theft Auto. Yet, sitting in the Austin Convention Centre last weekend, I spotted Halo’s Master Chief wandering through the hallway. Later that afternoon, Six to Start, the alternate reality game-makers from Clerkenwell, London, won both the experimental category at the SXSWi awards and the best in show gong.

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  • [Games Theory] Help - my thesis is due and I can't stop playing

    Thursday April 16, 2009 @ 12:28 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 16 April 2009

    It is inevitable that at this stage in my PhD – the dreaded writing-up phase – I can see the blasted thing everywhere. I can’t eat, sleep or play without some tenuous and convoluted association with social networks, social psychology and online community interrupting the few moments I’m trying to clear my head of it. This ranges from creating mini-networks out of peas and spaghetti on my dinner plate to dreaming of correlations in my sleep. The worst is when it creeps into my fun time and turns every game I play into an exercise in theory.

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  • [Games Theory] The start of something beautiful in San Francisco

    Thursday April 02, 2009 @ 12:25 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 2 April 2009

    There is a sea change in the games industry, and thank heavens to Betsy. It’s no secret that the output of the games industry has hit me like a damp squib in recent years: my favourite pick in 2007 was a low-key Japanese romance and last year it was a web data tracking tool. After almost a decade working through the vast ocean of games technology, my interactive Babylon was a karaoke game. To say I was disillusioned with the populist zombie and gangster thrillers that consumers and critics crowed over was an understatement.

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  • [Games Theory] Please release me from Mary King's Riding Star

    Thursday March 12, 2009 @ 12:22 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 12 March 2009

    Tell most people of a certain age that you’re involved with the games industry and you get two responses: a contemptuous, “Must be great to play games all day” snarl, or a starry-eyed, “I’ve got a great idea for a triple-A game!”. Newsflash, folks: as a hack, I’m only one industry evolutionary seam above the slime mould, belonging to the bulging genus Liggerus Maximus, which is presumed to survive by feeding on free beer and launch party swag.

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  • [Games Theory] Gamers: all your data are belong to us

    Thursday February 26, 2009 @ 12:20 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 26 February 2009

    When the news broke last week that researchers had gained access to a phenomenal – I mean phenomenal – amount of data about player behaviours scraped from the EverQuest II servers, the web went wild. Gamers around the world panicked, and virtual sabres rattled.

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  • [Games Theory] Battleships v Super Mario - who wins the mind game?

    Thursday February 12, 2009 @ 12:15 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 12 February 2009

    Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, recently argued a case against traditional board games. Classics such as the US game Candy Land and Battleships were described as “games of pure chance” and “moronic” on the weblog Boing Boing in comparison with the digital toys available to his children.

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  • [Games Theory] Stand by: games are the next content revolution

    Thursday January 29, 2009 @ 12:10 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 29 January 2009

    Ten years ago, everything looked up for the games industry – there were three brand new consoles on the shelves, a world of handheld machines to captivate us and the internet knocking on the door. It was bold, it was brash, and it was big money.

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  • [Games Theory] I'm ashamed we swallowed the games-as-pariah myth

    Thursday January 15, 2009 @ 12:07 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 15 January 2009

    I’m still fuming at reports from last week – including one in the Guardian – about claims that the online game World of Warcraft was “one of the top reasons for college dropouts in the US”. After this 11 million-strong multiplayer game came under attack by a student adviser in Minnesota, the US Federal Communications Commission representative Deborah Taylor Tate took the bait and made it into an international story. To our discredit, we swallowed the line, and I’m utterly dismayed at the way it was handled.

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  • [Games Theory] What's at the top of our gamers' list of choices?

    Thursday December 18, 2008 @ 12:05 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 18 December 2008

    If your eyes have landed here, it’s likely you’re already a gamer. If that’s the case, you are likely to have already purchased the games that made the top five of our readers’ choice list. The rest of this column should give you a slightly warm but overpoweringly smug glow, knowing that you are part of a gamer collective with mutually great taste in entertainment. If, instead, you’re a gamer’s loved one grasping for ideas about what buy for Christmas, let your panicked eyes rest here, your journey’s end in the search for the perfect gift.

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  • [Games Theory] Welcome aboard our wounded spaceship

    Thursday December 04, 2008 @ 12:03 AM (UTC)

    Aleks Krotoski

    The Guardian, Thursday 4 December 2008

    Not content with merely writing about games, the Guardian’s Games blog has produced its first game, a collaboratively generated text adventure set on a wounded ship deep in space. Our hero is a hapless space captain, alone, running out of oxygen and hounded by hungry space grues. You have one objective: fix the ship or die. A simple premise, perhaps, but one that took hundreds of volunteer hours to develop, and a journey that taught us all deep respect for the men and women behind the games we play.

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