Games Brief

Author Archive

1. GAMESbrief Nominated for Games Media Award

   August 13, 2010

   This is a guest post by freelance narrative designer, Tom Jubert. Check out his blog at http://blog.tomjubert.com/ The man is too modest. Nicholas has been running GAMESbrief for a little over 18 months now, an endeavour which began as an occasional opportunity for him to shed some light on industry goings on and has developed [...]

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   Posted in: Past Events

   Tagged with: Games Media Awards, gamesbrief

   2 Comments

2. Tom Jubert: Rumours of Keith Vaz’s Malevolence Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

   July 8, 2010

   Not entirely disimilar to my defence earlier this year of Iain Duncan Smith, I’m forced to jump to the aid of the man the games press loves to hate. There’s no doubt Keith Vaz has said some entirely idiotic and uninformed things about the games industry, but his latest call for government to better enforce [...]

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   Posted in: Opinion

   Tagged with: age ratings, controversy, guest post, politics

   2 Comments

3. DLC: Value For Money Naysayers Are Looking At It All Wrong

   January 31, 2010

   A comment in this interview with Rebellion’s AvP Director, David Brickley, got me thinking recently about DLC. Largely thanks to the online capabilities of seventh gen consoles it’s a sometimes controversial revenue stream that’s grown fast over the last few years, and as a result has come under close scrutiny from industry and consumers alike. [...]

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   Posted in: Featured, Opinion

   Tagged with: capcom, controversy, digital distribution, downloadable content, games industry, guest post

   4 Comments

4. Iain Duncan Smith’s Violent Games Controversy: Credit Where Credit’s Due

   January 26, 2010

   Last week Times Online published this Iain Duncan Smith piece, in which the former Tory leader talks about children, and tax and booze… and briefly mentions violent video games. The relevant paragraph is this: “Innocence, he warns, is being destroyed by children’s television and computer games. ‘We are driving children to lose their childhood, and [...]

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   Posted in: Featured, Opinion

   Tagged with: controversy, games industry, guest post, politics, starred

   No Comments

5. How to Deliver a Compelling Interactive Narrative in Under Ten Minutes

   November 2, 2009

   I’ve just played Small Worlds by David Shute (thanks RPS). It’s a part of the 6th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, and demonstrates that games can be short, compelling and meaningful in a way that’s unique to the interactive format – without straying too far into the abstract hinterland of ‘art games’ like The Path. The [...]

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   Posted in: Sandbox

   Tagged with: browser games, guest post, narrative, starred

   2 Comments

6. Charles Cecil and Dave Gibbons Talk iPhone, Beneath a Steel Sky 2 and the Folly of Non-Linear Narrative

   October 9, 2009

   Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen fame) and Charles Cecil (of Broken Sword fame) hosted a talk at BAFTA earlier this week to celebrate today’s iPhone re-release of the 1994 game for which they’re both famed – Beneath A Steel Sky (Buy it from ). A number of interesting topics were broached during the question and answer [...]

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   Posted in: Featured, Sandbox

   Tagged with: charles cecil, dave gibbons, games, iphone, writing

   No Comments

7. Character Development in Video Games

   September 14, 2009

   I sometimes get the feeling that although narrative design is all the rage at the moment, maybe it doesn’t get the same level of behind the scenes developmental commentary afforded to the other disciplines. To that end, I recently published an internal character developmental insight / postmortem from Penumbra: Black Plague, and it’s currently doing [...]

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   Posted in: Featured, Sandbox

   Tagged with: guest post, writing

   3 Comments