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.

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Just before Christmas Day the final Mechanic column of the year went up, a deep dive into the design principles behind the Dust District level of Dishonored 2 with Harvey Smith.

It also marked the first anniversary of the column. Holy heck! A whole year of it. I posted a quick rundown of its first six months or so here, and since then I’ve looked at Thumper, Crusader Kings 2, Sorcery!, N++, Rimworld, Grow Home and many more. I’m trying to maintain a great deal of variety and to tell stories about great games which many people don’t necessarily realise. I really hope people have been enjoying it.

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So, OK, Britsoft: An Oral History came out a very long time ago now. Since then, Read-Only Memory has published a whole new book, the fantastic The Bitmap Brothers: Universe. OK, sure, it was written by my good chum Duncan Harris and published by my friend publisher Darren Wall so maybe I would say this, but it really is a detailed, beautiful, insightful and fun book about an important group of game makers at a remarkable and formative time for the medium.

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Each fortnight this year, I’ve been writing a game design column at Rock Paper Shotgun called The Mechanic. It’s all about putting games up on blocks, and taking a wrench to hack out their best features to see how they work.

I’ve covered Doom and Brutal Doom, Duskers and Spelunky, Alien Isolation and Invisible Inc, Kentucky Route Zero and Super Time Force. And lots more besides.

They’re all based on interviews with their designers; what I really like to try to do is to find a feature of a game that players might not be aware of and yet is central to why it’s good. What I love is to be able to explain how much thought and creativity went into something players may never have considered.

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Hey so I’m giving some talks on Minecraft soon! The first is at Gamecity on October 25, and then early in November I’m going to Sharjah International Book Festival in the United Arab Emirates, which is kinda incredible.

The talks will be based on the Blockopedia, where I look at the amazing properties of a few different blocks. Here’s the blurb!

To really master Minecraft, you need to know the science behind its many kinds of blocks, from birch wood to brewing stands. Alex Wiltshire, author of the Minecraft Blockopedia, will take you on a tour of the blocks that make up the world of Minecraft, including how grass grows, fire spreads, redstone conducts and beacons … beacon. On the way, he’ll uncover and share the amazing facts, delights and crazy secrets that lie behind this pixel land, and help you build and survive even better!

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From April 2013 to August 2015 I was communications manager at Hello Games, which was a role that kind of evolved as I went along, but it boiled down to: if it involved talking with the outside world, I’d have had a hand in it.

So I ran Hello’s social media accounts, wrote blog posts and other bits and pieces, managed its public email address, dealt with press and lined up interviews and meetings. I worked with Sony and Valve’s internal teams, and I also established and managed Hello Games’ presence on various store fronts including Steam and PlayStation Store, and many other bits and pieces.

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Very soon, a book I edited on the early British game industry called Britsoft: An Oral History will be released. This is really exciting!

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I wrote a book! It’s called the Minecraft Blockopedia and it’s a guide to all the blocks in Minecraft, with each entry examining their behaviour and uses, and it’s going to be published by Egmont on December 4.

It looks like this:

Yeah, it’s hexagonal, which marks a rather dramatic debut as a book author, hey. Must’ve been a complete nightmare for Egmont’s production team. Or exciting. Probably a bit of both.

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I always thought Alessi were a pretty grotesque design company, making expensive objects that bastardise functionality and beauty. The classic: Starck’s Juicy Salif, an orange squeezer that appears to reinvent the way we extract juice from citrus fruit with elegance and simplicity, and which makes a whole fucking mess of it. And what’s this? Here I am beguiled by founder Alberto Alessi in a new interview with The Guardian. He calls Alessi customers ‘design victims’ (“Design victims are very important to our business model”) and calls another Starck project, the Hot Bertaa kettle, “a complete fiasco”, going on to say something amazing:

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Fugazi have been archiving and making available to buy live recordings of their about-a-billion gigs, which is such a fantastic project, partly for the fact the whole thing plays so true to their attitude. Done themselves, and in this context:

There is a lot to be excited about in the ways we produce and consume music in 2014, but it’s often difficult to decipher where the music ends and the contextual media structures around it begin. The best thing about Fugazi, and the live series, is that the music is always the message. There are no Facebook or Twitter logos polluting its pages; no publicist blasting emails about how Dischord is revolutionizing music; no attempt to sell to a nostalgic market. For MacKaye, it remains a matter of completing a simple task demanded by a pile of tapes that captured a small slice of American history.
→ Fugazi’s sound and fury, now on demand

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