Category: Essays

  • Rhetorical Questions

    Initial responses to my off-hand reference to an analytic/persuasive divide in the critical videogame blogosphere ranged from incomprehension to ardent agreement, and even a blog post ‘In defence of trolling’ (about which I’m still not sure how to respond other than to say I’m flattered the author thought my ideas worth responding to). In my […]

  • In Print: KillScreen

    So in the middle of moving house this past week, I nearly forgot to mention that I received a copy of my first ever published piece of writing. It’s paired up with the simply amazing photography of Daniel Purvis, who went to quite an effort to go out into the landscape I was writing about […]

  • An Exhausted Blogosphere

    Last time we looked at the early period of the videogame blogosphere as Dan Golding’s blog post ‘Mapping the Brainysphere’ and I both saw it emerging, and we also looked at the forces of formation from an Actor Network Theory perspective. One of the things that ANT turns on its head is the idea of […]

  • A brief Actor Network Theory history of the videogame blogosphere

    After a very productive meeting with my PhD supervisor today I want to try distil some of the renewed focus my project has gained. My PhD project, tentatively called ‘An Actor Network Theory assessment of online community creation’, is all about the critical videogame blogosphere and how it came about. There’s a bunch of assumptions […]

  • “Replayability” is NOT a word, so stop using it idiot!

    There’s a word that gets bandied about a bit when talking about playing a videogame for a second, third, fourth, or many more times. That word is “replayability”. If you’re not familiar with the word (chances are good if you’re reading this blog that you are, however) go look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. […]

  • Essay: Unreliable

    In the very first issue of the online Game Studies journal back in 2001, Markku Eskelinen noted that [here’s a cached version if game studies is still down], In narratives and many other kinds of fiction it is acceptable and sometimes even preferable that users are misled by being given wrong instructions. But in games […]