Ninjas

I am really quite pleased with this.

Brunel Talk 2008

Yay -- what is a year between giving a presentation and letting anyone have access to it? Anyway, this is the Brunel Conference Keynote I gave from September 2008. It lacks the video and still clocks in at a 4.5 Mb Pdf, but it does cover some of the ground I am now working on related to videogames as essentially excessive. I was reminded of this when Ian Bogost gave an excellent keynote at DiGRA 2009 about videogames as 'a mess'. I am not sure how much sense it makes as slides alone. Stumbled across as I tried to finish up a presentation I am due to give next Saturday in Dublin. Busy busy busy.

[Oh, and I forgot to mention that this was an attempt at an analysis of where Spore fits in relation to Game Studies -- I am always intrigued about the process of allowing oneself to held to ransom by a quick response to games shortly after release, but so far this seems to have held up well enough.)

Nasty Bugs

I wonder if there is any relationship between the fact that the corridors are now full of returning students and I feel utterly ill? Laptop out and feverish I stumble across a developer page (!?) at a site have never heard of Softpedia.com that has a stack of my little games on it. Strange -- there is even one there that I have never taken out of WIP because it doesn't really work (a garbage sorting game titled Junk). I am well aware of the complete and total lack of control you have when you put things online, and that I have never bothered putting a licence or anything more than a vague copyright sign on my games, but it still feels odd to see things travel without being told. I guess that is what Freeware is.

Meanwhile I have been tinkering with the layout and vocabulary of Pinball Panda. hence the screenshot:



And now to bed with a fever.