It’s commonplace for longtime gamers like me to complain about the dearth of big, honking manuals like they made Back in The Day. The truth is, manuals as instruction booklets aren’t as important as they used to be since tutorials and easily accessible in-game documentation make them redundant. Three recent manuals have reignited some of [...]

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This month’s guest blogger is Alan Au, a game industry freelancer, academic, and advocate. Having grown up in an era of interactive entertainment, he is now exploring the connection between games, technology, and society. More importantly, he’s having a good time doing it. ———————————- Welcome to the age of participatory culture.

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Tocqueville called America a “classless society” and he was mostly right, at least in 19th century terms. People in 1830s America weren’t generally born to privilege and you could work your way into Congress or the Presidency from backwoods adventures and Indian fighting. Things have changed a little now, but this isn’t a political blog [...]

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I am probably one of the only strategy gamers on Earth not the least bit excited about Supreme Commander. It’s not far off, and the media blitz is in full swing. Interviews, previews, new screenshots…there is every expectation by the media and the fanbase that the early 2007 release is going to be huge. I [...]

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My Civ Chronicles background interview with Bruce Shelley has been distributed to a variety of places. You can find it here at Shacknews. Shelley added some of his own reminiscences of working on Civilization as part of a Chronicles idea that didn’t quite pan out. Shelley’s reflections underline just how difficult game production used to [...]

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I apologize for the slow pace of updates lately. My desk is full of work for three different outlets, plus I want to shop around a review for Dominions 3. I also need to get my indie column finished. So this is a bad time to get sick. On the plus side, it’s steady work, [...]

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