journalism

  • My 2015

    When people I’ve not seen for a while ask me ‘what are you working on right now?’, I give them this kind of glassy look that says ‘how long do you have?’ It’s this kind of look: //giphy.com/embed/13aSSyJaI5NkTm?html5=true This has been a hard, good year. Apart from coping with a new baby, I’ve probably worked for

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  • A Metric TON of my old Command & Conquer interviews

    So, a long time ago, I wrote a retrospective for PC Gamer about Command & Conquer. Like a conscientious hack, I did a tonne of interviews with people who’d worked on the project – far more than I needed to, because it’s always fun to reminisce with your heroes.

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  • A Basic Marketing and PR plan for Indies.

    Nowadays, I’m mainly a writer, designer and journalist. But I spent three years in video games PR, working for Warner Bros, Disney, NCsoft, Paramount, Ubisoft, IGN, Philips, Rising Star, Game City, The Toy Fair, 1C Games, Irrational Games, 505 Games and a ton more. Here’s a basic media campaign for an indie developer.

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  • How Are Games Changing SF Literature?

    Walking into any bookshop, the science-fiction section seen, from a distance, is healthy; an island of colour and variety amidst the sad faces of the ‘misery memoirs’, the black and bone of the ‘Dark Romance’, and the silver-backed Penguin classics. Yet, get closer, and there’s something strange. The colour comes in bursts, great streaks of…

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  • On Pandora, Mars and making games.

    There are these things we call games journalists – they’re funny creatures, all angst and acid, and they call themselves journalists, which these days has the connotation of news-discovery, which they rarely do, and truth-telling, which they mostly attempt, despite often having access to highly misleading sources. They also think of themselves as writers, because…

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  • Democracy: Experiments with Manifestos.

    What happens when no-one wins an election? All of the manifestos carefully crafted for the 2010 election by our political overlords were, more than usually, a complete waste of time. But us lovers of alternate histories couldn’t help but wonder how they would have ruled if they’d actually won, outright, and what the outcomes of…

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  • How to Apologise

    My small section of the internet is getting a little hotter these days; games journalism has always had its corrupt elements, but the combination of low-level “broken window” freebies corruption and the rarer (because of the expense) top-end “bought editorial” corruption, means that more and more well-meaning journalists are having to learn how to do…

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