An update

You might wondering where all the Subject Navigator posts have gone. To an extent, I am too. Unfortunately, it’s a matter of time, and free time, which I have none of at the moment – I’m in the middle of moving house and preparing for a big year. So I thought I’d update you all [...]

Brothers in Arms, the strategic desensitizer

There are few games that have struck me as wanting to be a film as Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. Or rather, wanting to be a TV series. The first ten minutes of Hell’s Highway had me seriously tossing up asking its creators if they shouldn’t just have just applied to work on The Pacific instead. [...]

Call of Duty 2 and the World War Two theme park

There is definitely a place for theory and lofty concepts. A blog is one such place. However, I very much admire L.B. Jefferies’ sentiment when he suggests that there comes a point when theorising is useless without practical implementation: “Talk is cheap and in abundance on the internet, it’s actually doing something that’s in such [...]

How Guy Debord can help us understand videogames

When researching my thesis, I looked at quite a few theories and theorists of space, place, and geography. Perhaps the most interesting discovery I made last year, however, was Guy Debord and the Lettrist International’s concept of psychogeography. Debord was a French Marxist who found influence in the ’60s, largely due to a fascinating book [...]

Mapping the Brainysphere: 29 blogs switched-on gamers should read

 
The year 2008 was nothing if not a great year for intelligent discussion of videogames. Every month, it seemed to me like a new blog would pop up with an amazingly insightful analysis of some new game, and I’d be forced to go through their backlogs for everything else they’d written. Underneath it all, there [...]