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Clone Wars: is plagiarism killing creativity in the games industry?
“Most people would assume it’s the money that hurts most and yes, the entire thing made us question whether we would be able to support ourselves financially moving forward. But that isn’t the main blow you take when your game is cloned. It’s more abstract, more fundamental than that…” Cloning – the practice of reverse ...
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Katamari Damacy’s Takahashi On Life After Namco
What a difference a year makes. At the 2009 Nottingham GameCity festival, Keita Takahashi, creator of the joyful Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, seemed lost. In a damp house on the outskirts of Nottingham, he worked with balls of plasticine, lengths of string and piles of bended paperclips in search of the design for ...
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Killerspiele: In Search of Germany’s Virtual Scapegoats.
An October Saturday and Stuttgart is pale with the cold. Outside the State Opera House, the city’s grand attraction, a skip sits awkward and incongruous to its surroundings. The sides are spray-painted with graffiti, a hip hop-cum-youth club pastiche probably commissioned to soften the otherwise stark utilitarian appearance of this giant iron dustbin. While the ...
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Foolish Things
I’ve been nominated for a Games Media Award in the ‘Specialist Writer (Online)’ category. Specialist, in case you’re wondering, refers not to the fact that nominees are special, but rather to our membership of the specialist press, which covers the games industry exclusively, as oppose to the mainstream press, whose games coverage is but one ...
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Long Time No See
Yesterday I stumbled across my life’s work. It took the form of a spattering of magazine contributions, piled high in the dusty belly of a Soho thrift store, 25 pence an issue. There amongst the musty clothes, yellowed comics and cracked DVD casings I read my old words, partially unfamiliar and somehow estranged, like photographs ...
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Tank Man and the Toilet
Charlie Cole’s iconic image of a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing is one of recent history’s best known photographs. The plastic-bagged groceries in his hands lend a sense of the mundane, everyday ordinariness to a moment that was anything but. Banned in China, the image remains ...
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Truth Pirates
On Monday Ars Technica reported a new study carried out by the BI Norwegian School of Management which found that those who download music illegally from P2P networks are more likely to spend money on legitimate downloads than those who do not. Following the recent sentencing of the owners of Bit Torrent site Pirate Bay, ...
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Best Thing I Saw Today #46: “Don’t Fall!”
Most gamers will be skeptical of any claims that this kind of technology might change interactive entertainment in any meaningful way. After all, virtual reality has always been a term synonymous with grand but ultimately vacuous promise. But even if it is yet another a tech demo gimmick, the evidence that this test subject’s brain ...
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“A Great Gentleman”
Lord Northcliffe, who founded popular journalism in Britain, was a man in love with political power: he not only used his newspapers to topple one government (Asquith’s in May 1915) and to create another (led by Lloyd George in December 1916), he also got himself appointed as Britain’s Director for Propaganda. His brother, Lord Rothermere, ...
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Robots and Geisha
angela carter
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Playing Games For Money, Playing Games For Fun
I remember a forum post, five or six years ago which appeared on the old Edge forums or, possibly, rllmuk. In it the poster wanted to gauge interest in an idea for a homemade videogame show he and a friend were planning. A few people commented that his vision for the show was the kind ...
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Detroit is Dying
The Weekly Standard publishes a mesmerising piece by Matt Labash, who spent a week watching and writing in Detroit, an American city crumbling alongside its three major motor manufacturers. Labash doesn’t try to explain the decay, claiming that unenviable task is “best left to historians” but instead looks and sees and reports. The result is ...