The Astros are stupid. If they were cheating in 2017 or 2018 or 2019, as documented in various Youtube videos (see below), they are stupid. Morons. Idiots. I should mention up front that I’ve been an Astros fan for years, and I followed the runs to the World Series in ’17 and ’19. There’s still […]
Tag Archives: video game writer
Your Videogame and Fair Use Copyright Law
The videogame world and the copyright office do have their collisions. In our modern digital culture, a video game can have as much popular mindspace as a popular film or television show. So, naturally, a big game can create opportunities for parody, comment, and post-modern artistic manipulation. We saw this question on Quora recently: Can […]
Video Game Vs. Real World Combat
Today’s chuckle is courtesy of Endless Origami, which hits on a favorite thought of mine: the differences between video game strategy and real-world combat strategy. Sometimes they are radically different, which means we’re in for a heap of trouble if (a la The Last Starfighter) the FPS video games we’ve been weaned on are actually being sent […]
Hulu Plus Review-ette
Hulu Plus Sounds Useful You know, it’s not hard to like Hulu Plus. One of the big wins for me is that Hulu Plus has a huge catalog of Criterion collection movies. These are classic arthouse movies and canonical cinema landmarks from a wide range of eras. And they have some essential TV shows that […]
ACL “Sound and the Jury” contest horrors
What happened to M. Night Shyamalan?
What the heck happened, M. Night Shyamalan? I just saw the ad for the new M. Night movie. It’s designed to look like some kind of andromeda strain movie. “There appears to be an event happening,” a man intones. This, according to our statistics, is the blandest, most uninformative, passive-voice piece of advertising ever recorded […]
Screenwriting: a ?!?! moment in Blade Trinity
A screenwriting thought: Blade Trinity puzzler Screenwriting isn’t game design (although a lot of game designers wish it were). Still, screenwriters are, like game writers, in the business of visual storytelling. Under that precept, I’d like to relate the following tale of woe. The other night I channelsurfed upon Blade Trinity. I’m as much a […]
Game design case study: why can’t I stop playing Bard’s Tale?
Game writing trumps game design? My current crap-game obsession is inXile’s Bard’s Tale for the PS2. An ill-fated classic-game revival, BT has very little in common with its storied predecessor (which I also loved back in the days when I was too young to buy my own computer – can you say “floppy disk swapfest”?). […]
game writers and gamers welcome
Game writers – specifically videogame writers – it’s here! The video game writer blog. Thoughts about the art and science of writing for games. War stories. Analysis of games, gameplay, and of course, game writing. Case studies of videogame writing and where it succeeds (Planetfall, God of War) — and fails, even in bestselling titles […]