Opinion

GamerGate – Welcome to games-journalism

I’ve been quiet lately. Illnesses and time in hospitals are partly to blame, but so has “GamerGate”, the elephant in the room that I’ve been reluctant to talk about.

GamerGate is a mixed-bag of intractable stuff, much of it (at best) misguided, and (at worst) ridiculous and offensive. Whatever its ostensible mission, it has had the effect of chilling speech, and causing many female games-writers and games-developers to consider another career, or to fear for their safety and that of their families.

I’ve not wanted to talk about this, because I’ve already gotten a dose of that treatment myself, and it is more or less inevitable that even the slightest criticism of GamerGate will likely generate more. Nevertheless, there are things that I feel need to be said.

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Dwarf Fortress, News

Dwarf Fortress 0.40.01 major release

After about two years, Dwarf Fortress – the most intricate world-simulation sandbox ever – has seen a major release, and an astonishing amount has been added to the game. New additions include new plants and animals, more complex trees, more interesting fortress reclamation, more detailed civilisation, social, and political models, and much, much more.

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Desura, Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc

Linden Lab acquires Desura games service

The Linden Lab banner behind the Desura logo

Linden Lab, the makers of shared creative spaces including Second Life, Patterns, Creatorverse, Versu, and dio, today announced that it has acquired Desura, a digital distribution service for PC gamers. The service will continue uninterrupted for current customers and the team and technology become a part of Linden Lab.

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Bioshock Infinite, Irrational Games, Review

Review: Bioshock Infinite

An image of a few of the pieces of the flying city of Columbia, with a statue of Zachary Comstock in the middle

Bioshock Infinite is a story about choices and their consequences, relationships, manipulation, the trousers of time, and how people react to terrible things. It’s also about a finger that is far more significant than it seems.

Bioshock Infinite is equal parts drama, horror, and The Outer Limits, spiced with flashbacks, flashforwards and Disney-Princess moments and littered with foreshadowings for those of you keeping score at home. And then, there’s the other stuff.

All of this is punctuated with violence. Not just any violence, but visceral, gory, ridiculous violence – The Evil Dead (1981) sort of violence, punctuating the story like a series of hand-crafted parodic set-pieces. Jarring, overdone, outré, overly-gamey, and yet, for all my distaste for the intricately-crafted bloodbaths of this single-path shooter, it remains that it is arguably vital to the core of the story.

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Interactive Fiction, Mobile Games, Versu

Linden Lab Launches a New Platform for Character-Driven Interactive Fiction: Versu for iPad

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Versu - Linden Lab, Maker of Shared Creative Spaces

Linden Lab, the makers of shared creative spaces including Second Life®, PatternsTM, CreatorverseTM, and dioTM, today announced the launch of Versu, a new character-driven interactive fiction platform that immerses readers in living stories. Versu is available for free today for iPad on the App Store. Versions for Android devices will be released soon.

A product of Linden Lab’s acquisition of LittleTextPeople earlier this year, Versu provides unique narrative experiences in which the reader is an integral part of character-driven interactive stories. In Versu, you take on a character with distinct preferences, concerns, and desires, as you explore and change a story through your decisions and interactions with other characters. The characters you encounter are endowed with sophisticated artificial intelligence and have their own unique personalities, motivations, and emotional reactions as you interact with them. The decisions you make and how you treat other characters define your character in the story and influence the narrative, giving each title the potential for many unique experiences to explore. In the future, the tool set used to build these immersive stories will be made available to users, enabling readers to insert their own characters and scenes into the narratives they explore.

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Consoles, Gaming, Opinion

King of the hole

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A collection of banknotes and coins from various countries

Over the past several years, there have been three major players in the console market, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

A console-maker has a number of avenues for drawing revenue from its console. It charges for console development kits, and code-signing, which allows it to pull a share of all third-party games revenue. It can charge network subscription fees to draw ongoing revenue from the console’s customers, it can produce its own first-party games with a greater margin than third-party developers, and – of course – it sells the actual console hardware and accessories. In short, the console-maker has the most opportunity to pull revenue from every part of the console ecosystem.

So, how much actual profit does that amount to for a console-maker? Well, in the case of Microsoft and Sony, the simple answer is none at all.

Sony’s console division hasn’t generated any profit since the Playstation 2, and Microsoft’s console division has never made a profit.

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Gaming, Opinion

Guns, violence, video-games, and the media

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"Don't blame [GTA San Andreas logo], 'cos it ain't San Andreas' fault"

Within mere minutes of any mass-shooting, the media (and assorted interest groups) are keen to tell you why the shooter(s) did what they did. In the recent shooting at Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, everyone was keen to explain in detail exactly why Adam Lanza murdered a bunch of people and then killed himself.

Of course, since (at the time) they didn’t even have the right name, the various motivations espoused for Lanza’s killing-spree were nothing more than purest fabrication. Fantasy and lies, basically. If anyone actually has gotten it right (and the truth will probably never be known) then it was only by accident – not by any great feats of journalism, investigation, facts, statistics, or deductive reasoning.

Violent video-games (in fact, just video-games generally) once again take pride-of-place as the culprit for this incident, and that’s demonstrably a load of hooey. I won’t try to tell you why Adam Lanza (or many of these other mass-shooters) did what he did, or what would have made things better – I don’t have authoritative information on that – but I can show you that video-games are not to blame.

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Minecraft

Minecraft maker, Mojang, sued for patent infringement by plaintiff who can’t spell “Minecraft”

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A scene from Minecraft, showing swampland, sand and water

Uniloc USA Inc, and Uniloc Luxembourg S.A. have today filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District Court of Texas against Minecraft maker Mojang, asserting patent infringement of US Patent 6857067.

The patent in question essentially appears to cover just about all forms of DRM and targets Minecraft on Android devices, as these devices call home to see if they’re authorised to run, and that’s a big no-no according to this patent.

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The Secret World

Seshat and Feldspar visit The Secret World

Two people stand in varying stages of readiness. A man with pistols and a woman holding metal claws. Both are sensibly dressed, in a field in front of a stone church.

In the wake of the release of Funcom’s new subscription-MMOG, The Secret World, my minions, Seshat and Feldspar delve into this new offering in the MMOG market and return with their impressions.

The Secret World drops players into a modern, yet magical world where most of the conspiracy theories are true. As the unexpected recipient of strange, magical energies, players align themselves with one of three vast, secret societies, to further their faction’s interests and thwart or avert whatever the apocalypse du jour may be.

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