July, 2012

“You cannot get any simpler than by saying, ‘What’s in the box?’,” asked Peter Molyneux at Rezzed earlier this month. “Is that a sufficient [question] to ask people to spend money on?” Curiosity is the first project from 22Cans, the studio Peter Molyneux started after quitting Microsoft in March of this year. The premise is [...]

In returning to our fortnightly section ‘Notes’, Game On presents a short, curated collection of games and links that don’t fit elsewhere. Games:  For a little while now, Pitchfork and Kill Screen have been producing music-based games under the banner of Soundplay. So far, there are four games, and each are very much worth playing:

The story, for those who don’t know it, goes like this: when Jetpack Joyride was first released, players bought it on iTunes for a few bucks, and that was that. But Halfbrick, the makers of the game, fairly quickly shifted their strategy from a single, up-front payment from players to purchase the game to multiple, [...]

After almost two weeks of Game Masters coverage, you’re probably getting sick of hearing about local videogame-related events by now. Don’t worry: I’ll be back to writing about videogames themselves shortly, but I thought it would be remiss of me not to point out some other upcoming events around Australia. First is the Game On [...]

There’s no doubt that Game Masters is about as good as an exhibition of videogames could presently hope to be. It is among the best—if not the best—of its kind. If anything, Game Masters proves that videogames belong in cultural spaces: not just as part of the conversation, as a box to tick to prove [...]

It would be difficult to point to Warren Spector and say, “Game Designer.” If there is any sort of popular mental image of what a designer might look like, Spector does not fill it. Now 56, Spector is Steven Spielberg without the baseball cap. He’s your beloved, yet somewhat formidable college professor, underscored with a [...]

At the media launch of ACMI’s new Game Masters exhibition on Wednesday, I had the pleasure of sitting down with ACMI’s Head of Exhibitions, Conrad Bodman. While I was originally planning on using the interview as background in my final review of the exhibition, the material ended up being so interesting that I’ve decided to [...]