Category: Wireframe

6th October 2022
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Lore of Babylon

How do you know if someone’s read The Silmarillion? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

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20th June 2022
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Slouching Tiger, Missing Dragon

A 21st-century Kafkaesque nightmare of boy bands, ‘sang wenhua’ and games.

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19th April 2022
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The Little Grey Cells

The best detective games pare back their mechanics to an absolute minimum: the player’s mind.

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8th March 2022
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You Gotta Have Faith

Chinese gamers live in a forbidden city. Can plucky indie devs (that’s us) sneak inside its walls?

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7th February 2022
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Here’s Looking At You, Kid

“It’s James Bond fanfiction written by nerds”. Guess the genre?

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13th January 2022
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Gather Your Arty

You’ve probably heard the phrase “art imitates life”.

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16th December 2021
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Dangerous Play

Friedrich Nietzsche was a brilliant man whose most famous theory, the Übermensch, has wrongly linked him to Nazi and fascist ideology.

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12th November 2021
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Tend & Pretend: the Secret Life of Gendered Games

Is this Dark Souls in a dress?

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18th October 2021
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Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Making games for a living is almost certainly going to throw you into situations you never expected. When it does, your best hope is to have a clear idea of who you are and what you stand for so you can weather the storm.

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3rd September 2021
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The Church of Merch

Step into the church of the merch and take a pew with me.

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6th August 2021
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The Forbidden City

While under communist dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s, dissenting Czechoslovaks arrived at demonstrations, stood in front of the police and beat each other up with vegetables. This was to save police the trouble of doing it with batons, though it also protested a violent authoritarian regime without doing enough to get arrested. All hail the subversive surrealism of European liberals!

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9th July 2021
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Horse Face / Plate Face

Here is a game that will ruin your life.

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11th June 2021
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Trouble in the North

Philip II of Macedon invaded Greece, won a lot of fights and trembled lustily on the borders of Sparta. He sent the Spartans a threatening message asking if he should come as friend or foe. The ephors responded: ‘Neither.’

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14th May 2021
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Ceci n’est pas une game

I wrote the article below for Wireframe, a British game dev magazine which ‘lifts the lid on video games’. And, inexplicably, lets me have a monthly column.

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15th April 2021
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“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

I wrote the article below for Wireframe, a British game dev magazine which ‘lifts the lid on video games’. And, inexplicably, lets me have a monthly column.

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4th December 2020
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Let’s Talk About Text

Story in games is a hot topic. But what about structure? How does the narrative form of a game influence its player’s experience?

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6th November 2020
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The Law of Boob

Every week I receive ICO Partners’ Steam newsletter. It’s a simple round-up of all the week’s latest Steam games, alongside their number of reviews and overall review score

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9th October 2020
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The Disappearance of Everything (or, Don’t Underestimate Bards)

There’s a concept in literature of the ‘oral tradition’, where stories spread by word of mouth rather than being written down.

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