A couple of quick nods to recent The Mechanic articles. Most recently I talked to Zach Barth about the excellent Exapunks, a puzzle game about coding viruses and using them to hack candy bar recipes and printshop accounts systems so you can publish zines.

What about a puzzle game about writing viruses like Stuxnet, which was designed to attack a very specific kind of industrial controller used in Iranian nuclear centrifuges in order to destroy them? A game about writing programs that unfold, multiply and deploy themselves to make changes to the physical world.

› read more

Tomorrow night is the private view of the V&A’s Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, an exhibition on which I was a curator back in 2013/14. I’m incredibly excited to see how it’s all come together.

I was only working on the exhibition in its earliest stages, involved in pitching to the V&A’s board the concept of what videogames might look like in a gallery, in the hopes of unlocking a good budget and a big space. But I found the process fascinating, proof of the rigour that goes into making exhibitions at internationally renowned museums like the V&A.

› read more

I talked to four modders who are making money from their work about how they run their practice, and what challenges they face.

› read more

Release day for an indie developer sounds like it’d be a celebration. Years of work have finally reached a successful conclusion. They can sit back, relax, and wait for the adulation and money to roll in. But it’s not really like that. “I heard a lot of people speculate what this would feel like and I was never really sure what would happen when we finally hit launch,” says Simon Stafsnes Andersen, head of Owlboy maker D-Pad Studio. “The reality was … conflicting.”

The truth is that launch is not an end. It’s the start of something else, and with that fresh start come many struggles that are born in the intensity of game development. This is true for almost all modern game developers, but it’s especially dramatic for indies who have spent half a decade or more quietly working on their dream project. After you’ve put all of yourself into a game, what comes next?

For PC Gamer I talked to Simon Stafsnes Andersen, who led development of Owlboy for nine years, Eric Barone, who made Stardew Valley for four and a half years, Ben Porter (Moonquest, six years), Joakim ‘Konjak’ Sandberg about Iconoclasts (eight years) and Jens Andersson about Yoku’s Island Express (five years). I was honoured to get some tender and candid insights into what it meant for these developers to let their games go out into the world.

› read more

I have completely rebuilt my website. This is it, here. The idea is that it looks much like my old one, with the same colours and fonts so you probably haven’t noticed, but under the hood it’s completely different.

› read more

I guess a couple of things have been niggling me for a while with The Last Mech, but they hadn’t been coming into focus. But after last night’s playtest with Tom, they kinda did. The big change I’m making - or at least testing for - is a simple one, but it could be huge and mess everything up. Or it could make for a more dynamic game.

› read more

These changes mark the point where I’m almost comfortable with making The Last Mech semi-public. So I am. I think there’s enough richness in the systems to make a game of push-and-pull with reasons to fight and to run, with a new system adding extra strategy. And I think that feels good.

› read more

I’ve written another book about Minecraft! It’s called Minecraft Mobestiary, and it’s a natural history of all the mobs in the game. And it’s out TODAY!

› read more

I wrote this for Edge’s website back in maybe 2013, before it was swept away in some Future Publishing web strategy tsunami. I’ve always been quite pleased with it, so I delved into the Internet Archive to mount a rescue.

GTA isn’t just humping dogs and UFOs, strip bars, BAWSAQ and a mouse pointer with an erected middle finger. It’s not just lowball humour, nihilistic violence, misogyny and a seething pool of crass satire that seems to sneer at everything and everyone.

That’s all there in GTAV, of course, but we’re talking about a game with the scale of a state here. For all of the ugliness there’s beauty, too.

› read more

Last month was … busy. And exciting! I wrote a lot of words, and I’m actually quite pleased with a lot of them. I thought I’d present a quick chronological rundown, cos I’ve done a terrible job of cataloguing them anywhere else.

I kicked off the year with two weeks’ writing for Minecraft’s website. I wrote about many different things, like the amazing WesterosCraft, which celebrated its fifth anniversary of building the Seven Kingdoms in blocks. I also looked at how a mini-computer built in redstone, and explained the nature of obsidian, along with some other pieces that haven’t gone up yet. I really like Minecraft.net’s redesign and how it celebrates what Minecraft players are making with a mature voice that takes them seriously. Good work, Owen and Marsh.

› read more