Continue Magazine – Issue 1 preview is out!

A while ago I got into a discussion with The Internet (Marco Fiori was at the center of it if I remember rightly) and it ended up with me publishing this post – What I try/want to fix with Games Journalism. This got picked up by Paul Presley who was working on a new top secret project which he invited me to pitch to. And pitch I did.

As you all probably know by now, that project turned out to be Continue Magazine and it’s a project that I’ve been very excited about because it’s made specifically to fix What I Try To Fix. The preview edition of Issue 1 has launched today, meaning it’s a collection of hefty samples of some of the full articles that are going into the mag – including my huge feature on indie developers (but not my retrospective on Blood Money, which is something to look out for in the full thing).

The preview looks great, I’m very excited to be a part of this and you should totally CHECK IT OUT. No doubt I’ll put something up here too when the full issue is out

Game Logic vs Choice & Consequence

Without getting overly self indulgent on this, I did a thing that I’m quite (very) proud of. I’ve written something for Rock Paper Shotgun, which is a good thing for a lot of reasons. It’s on an idea that I was putting together at Eurogamer, which all spiralled out of a conversation I had with Paul Millen about Deus Ex – a conversation which turned into the opening paragraph. Here’s the crux of the argument:

There is a clear disparity between what a player does or wants to do and what game environments or characters know how to handle. The above examples are extreme cases, of course, but it happens all the time – how often have you set off an explosion, killed a man, or even half flattened a city with barely any repercussion or consequence? How many times have you been forced to game a conversation tree to fit closest to what your character wants to happen; or been pushed down one path even though another makes much more sense?

But what are these mysterious “above examples”? What else do I have to offer in the 2200 words?

HAVE A LOOK