“to be an intellectual is to be someone motivated by ideas. That doesn’t mean that you’re simply interested in ideas, or that you enjoy the abstract reasoning associated with chewing through logical problems. It means that you’re someone who thinks about ideas and then changes their life on the basis of those ideas.”
On the edge of Ostrava there’s a sharp-sided hill. If you stood on it, you’d have a view over the old city, and you’d marvel at the number of smokestacks you saw. They’re all shapes and sizes and surround the old town centre like widely-spaced fence posts. If it was wintertime, you’d also marvel at
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…
For a quick piece I wrote for the Guardian, about developing games in the developing world, I talked to Asi Burak, co-President of GamesForChange. What is Games for Change? Firstly, to define our unique role and mission: Games for Change (G4C) is not a game studio. In some exceptional cases, like the Half the Sky
To the tune of: Various Artists – A Visit To A Sad Planet Gareth Garratt is curled up in his wheelchair, his body secured in a bucket seat while his hands clutch at the side of a desktop. His chin is pressed down onto a Toshiba mouse and he’s using that to control a virtual
A couple of paragraphs I worked up for PC Gamer, for a forthcoming article, but I didn’t end up using. To the tune of: Tenacious D – The Government Totally Sucks Prior to the 2010 election, all three national parties had pledged to give UK games developers tax breaks; despite being something the Tories and
To the Tune of: Jeff Wayne;Richard Burton;Justin Hayward – The Eve Of The War This is the longer draft of a short piece I did for the just-released Delayed Gratification. Before the Wikileaks stuff happened incidentally, so I was prescient about 4Chan. Missile weapons, phalanxes, military organisation, artillery, ironclads, dreadnoughts, machine guns, submarines, and finally nuclear
(Panning montage of serious-looking people talking, national institutions, angry fingers being pointed, people walking around and behind things.) (Tenor voice-over). “It’s a blight on the national psyche, an easy way out for hundreds of people who want easy answers. Politicians condemn it, Doctors say it destroys lives. But what does documentary-making really do to Britain?
To the tune of: Stevie Wonder – Happy Birthday . It was my eleventy-first birthday on Monday. Here’s what I did. Timestamp: 12.30 a.m. OH, what a night! A quiet drink with several friends ended with me dropping my switch card somewhere and Quintin dunking my phone in his Gulden Draak. The phone didn’t die
To the tune of: Kate Bush – Pi As a PR and journalist, I’ve been frustrated by the non-gamers and anti-gamers – the people who haven’t played or would never play games – and how they control the media. As the years have gone by, their hold on the mainstream has been eroded and the