On Entitlement: Are We Whiners, Or Just Passionate?

Image by Daniel Horacio Agostini, licensed under Creative Commons Just when you thought the word ‘fanboy’ had gone away and gamers could have conversations without throwing trite slurs at each other, there’s a new villain in town: ‘entitled’. It crops

Breaking Up With "League of Legends."

Hi everybody, I’m Kevin and I have a problem with games. (Muffled chorus: Hi Kevin.) I’ve uninstalled Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri because I stopped doing anything else.  I’d sit down to play at my desk for fifteen minutes and then

The Road Fast Travelled: How Fast Travel Can Affect an Open-World

‘Somewhere ages and ages hence  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by And that has made all the difference.’ Robert Frost – The Road Less Travelled Since the dawn of enlightened

Blizzard and Bioware's MMOs: Telling Stories From Opposite Directions

There’s a lot of presumption out there that MMORPGs can’t or don’t tell stories like their single-player counterparts. Me, I think it’s nonsense. Maybe that was true in the past. It isn’t now.

In fact, I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve evolved from oldschool monster-clubbing. Somehow, some way, MMOs started telling stories. Final Fantasy XI has character-focused missions bound together into a grand narrative, Age of Conan has its early-game switches between single-player and multiplayer, and Guild Wars has its hub-and-instance structure. Dungeons and Dragons Online actually has a narrator. Storytelling’s gotten big, and storytelling choices has become key to differentiation within the genre.

Even World of Warcraft (WoW) has evolved into a story-focused game.

Smart phone connectivity is a way better industry fad than motion controls.

Easily the neatest rising trend in the game industry right now is the connectivity we can have with our games when we’re not playing them. Thanks to smart phone connectivity, we can bid on auction house items in WoW and keep our galactic readiness in Mass Effect 3 at a reasonable level without even booting up a PC or console. There’s even an app for an interactive map of Skyrim out there.

And so early in the event that keeps our YouTube and Google Reader tabs constantly open we have already have seen how Nintendo and Microsoft are making sure we don’t ever escape from our little gaming worlds.

How Video Games arrived

Some may say a lot of gamers are like me: a varyingly unemployed twenty-five year old who grew up on X-Men cartoons, Super Nintendo video games, and fruit roll-ups. As a generation we saw movies like Clerks and we envied

World of Warcraft: The Austrian Paradise

When the caucus results came out in Iowa, Ron Paul declared that we we’re all Austrians now. What he meant was that his followers were supporters of the Austrian School of Economics. A school of thought that was championed by

World Of Warcraft Turns Seven: A Hit In More Ways Than One

Blizzard is kicking off it’s seventh year celebrations by offering players who log in between the 20th of November and the 3rd of December a feat of strength and an item granting bonus to XP and reputations gains. There’s more!

Crafting My Ideal MMO

I’ve never cared much for MMOs. I’ve tried out several different ones, only lasting a few hours in each, among them Age of Conan, Rift, The Lord of the Rings Online, and even the most lauded – or nefarious, depending

New Features Come to WoW's Mobile Armory on iPhone

World of Warcraft’s Moblie Armory app for the iPhone has just received a new update, and with it comes a pretty hefty list of new features and improvements.  Users will now have more control over auction house tools, and accessibility