Category: thoughts
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Australian Games Industry Study: Working Conditions
One of the recurring themes arising out of the interviews with Australian games developers is the issue of ‘crunch’ time, the period in the development of a game – usually towards the end of a project – when overtime (often unpaid) becomes mandatory. Crunch time is often necessary, as one interview participant in my current study…
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Destroying the myths of original creation one episode at a time
One old cliche I should have paid more attention to is ‘never meet your heroes’. I discovered this the hard way back when I was writing my PhD and I attended a law symposium on the Creative Commons in Brisbane. The keynote speaker Lawrence Lessig, whose books and blog had inspired the political direction of my…
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Made in Australia: a brief exploration of Australian iPad apps (June, 2011)
The Apple Store (accessed via the iPad) ‘Featured’ tab now includes a ‘Made in Australia’ section subtitled ‘Great Apps for Australians’. What counts as made in Australia, or an Australian app, let alone Apps for Australians isn’t clearly defined, and something I plan to unpack further in the future. Similarly, there is no information as…
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iPad2 as content producer #1
Early critics of the Apple iPad suggest the device was intended purely as a media content receiver, and the limited range of (buggy) content producing apps at launch in April 2010, seemed to vindicate this position. Then the flood of apps came and the apps for creating music, drawing and digital manipulation of images (read…
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My (current) relationship with Apple
The first iPad was my reintroduction to the world of Apple. I’d enjoyed doing my high school homework on the boxy little Apple Macintosh Classic, but the lack of games made the Intel 486 a much more appealing machine. Although I spent summers working to afford memory upgrades, the ability to take control of both…
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Being a fan sometimes has its costs
I should be working on a book chapter, but the news today has me thinking in parallels. Elisabeth Sladen, the actress who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and the Sarah Jane Adventures has died due to cancer at age 63. It has been a bad year for fans with the passing of the…
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Finish It! – Mortal Kombat and the missing R18+
The banning of Mortal Kombat in Australia this week is pushing all the right buttons. By ‘refusing classification’ for Mortal Kombat 8, the Classification Board has reignited an already well flambeyed interest in the missing R18+ rating for video games. Australia’s National Classification System (NCS) is without an R18+ classification for video games, making us…
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The 2011 NO BUY Game Challenge
Let’s see, CIV5, Call of Duty Black Ops, Star Craft 2, and there are probably more games I purchased in 2010 and haven’t really played out. I’ve ‘finished’ the campaigns but haven’t really gotten to the depth of game play with the multiplayer on any of them. I’m deep into WoW again with the expansion,…
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Balancing WoW
Back to work this week, which means I have to scale back the World of Warcraft binge I was able to indulge in during the evenings over the 10 days of the shutdown period for christmas and new years. For the first time since early 2008 I didn’t do any work related emails, reading, writing…
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Three Zoos in Three Weeks and the truth about Santa
Zoos are problematic for me. I don’t really liked the idea of caged animals, it’s way too prescient of the cages we put around ourselves (both literal and metaphorical) and as the only locations to see these animals (That is until we colonise space – and or time – and perfect DNA replication and terraforming: …
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