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Private provision of public goods
This piece by Patrick Miller in the wake of the 1UP/UGO/Gamespy closures is bracing, painful, and absolutely necessary. It details the desperately broken economics behind game enthusiast websites: they...
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Anita Sarkeesian’s First “Tropes v. Women” Video is Out
Yep. After all the shouting and yelling and accusations and whatnot about pretty much everything but the videos in question–largely revolving around a backlash against their funding and a...
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Women’s take on the DC Universe
Not my normal subject for discussion, but I ended up really enjoying Women Writing on Comics‘ breakdown of the “New 52″ DC comics universe. Especially their discussion of Wonder Woman: several of the...
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I’ve Had an Extraordinarily Bad Day
…but this isn’t the place to talk about it. (If you’re THAT curious, email me. Who knows? You might even be able to help. Yes, you. You, in the sweater.) (That’ll put Gmail’s spam filter through its...
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What makes something art? Copyright law!
This has to be the most elaborate troll of the gaming community I’ve seen since Jack Thompson. “games aren’t art because they’re code, and that’s proven by how they’re copyrighted”? Glorious. Kudos,...
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Diablo 3 Auction House was “a mistake”. (Guess who WASN’T mistaken?)
So here’s Blizzard talking about the auction house on Joystiq: [Diablo 3 Director Jay] Wilson said that before Blizzard launched the game, the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses...
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STOP IT. Stop with the formalism thing. Stop it right now.
A very simple response comes to mind: “Tadhg Kelly, please stop trying to tell me ’what games are’. To be extremely blunt, judging by both your site and your CV, I don’t think you’ve earned the right.”...
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Dan Cook and the value of academics
There’s a good piece in Gamasutra by Dan Cook talking about older game designers and the “rebellion” against them that seems to be going on among younger and/or indie designers. I’d recommend you read...
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Boston bombing reaction now at “Spurring the Centre”
I’ve just started a new straight-politics/policy blog called “Spurring the Centre“. I named it after this weekend’s Spur festival in Toronto, and intended it to talk mostly about the Spur festival....
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Another StC on Patton Oswalt and the two responses to terror
It can be found here, but I’ll repost it here on LC. ********** From Facebook: Boston. Fucking horrible. I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.” But I was...
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New Spurring the Centre on Boston
You can read it here; it’s about the Boston Bombing again, this time about the potential ramifications of the bombers’ possible Caucasian Muslim identities.
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Comics vs. Games 2 at the Toronto Comic Art Festival
I’ve been working on a somewhat-lengthy react to Spec Ops (which I’ve finally played), but since I’m waiting on something else I thought I’d give a breakdown of some of the games I got to try...
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Xbox One Revealed, Almost Gameless
You’re probably asking yourself “what the hell was THAT?” I did, for more than a little while. This was a gaming console launch that barely had anything to do with games. “Casual”, “hardcore”,...
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Games are Political. Sorry.
Had a fascinating exchange on Twitter with Dan Amrich, Community Manager for Activision. We were talking about the anti-used game stuff on the XBOX One (or XBone, if you prefer), and after I rebutted...
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Microsoft blinks on used games. Good.
So there’s reports floating around that the MS is saying that Xbox One will not charge a fee when you sell a game on. Instead, what it seems to do is use the physical disc as a bit of a “key”. You pass...
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Don’t listen to “Austrians” about hyperinflation in Diablo 3. Please.
Sooo…looks like the other shoe dropped on Diablo 3′s economy. I’d written a while back about deflated prices in Diablo 3; about how the auction house reduces everything to money, and about the volume...
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Microsoft Blinks
And how. After the drubbing by Sony and the entire media over their even-worse-than-I-had-anticipated DRM policies, they turned around and said “okay, fine, whatever you say, just stop hitting us.” So,...
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“Poors, Foreigners Shouldn’t Get Xbones!” sez Gizmodo writer, commenters
The worst part about Kyle Wagner’s Gizmodo piece about the Xbox One isn’t the touching-if-bizarre faith that games would be cheaper under MS’s old system. That’s just being Bad At Economics and it’s...
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Economics and Gaming
A short aside. Every so often I just want to grab a whole bunch of tech writers and game makers, shake them by the lapel, and yell “YOU LIVE WITHIN A LARGER ECONOMY”. I know. It sounds obvious! But...
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Don Mattrick Moves to…Zynga (Also: why he failed)
There are nowhere near enough snarky things that could be said at this news. So instead, post Xbone, I think I’ll just limit myself to wishing Microsoft’s Xbox unit all the best. Edit: Actually, I’ll...
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