I’ve been thinking a lot about cyberpunk recently for various reasons. Not only have I been re-reading some old classics such as Neuromancer and Snow Crash, but I am starting to see many worrying trends depicted in dystopian novels in everyday life. But perhaps one of the biggest misses from Read more…
A game called Palworld is taking the world by storm. This title has garnered 8 million downloads on Steam in less than 6 days, it also has become the second game in Steam history to hit over 2 million concurrent players. The game is a monster-collection-base-defence-crafting mash-up, you catch creatures Read more…
Text of my presentation at the IGF panel Videogames and their Uniting Power. Thanks very much to the organisers for the kind invitation to join this panel, it is an honour. I have to start with a disclaimer, I am just an academic who has been writing on the interface Read more…
I’ve just finished reading “Kill All Normies” by Angela Nagle, a thoroughly enjoyable experience for anyone who is interested in Internet culture wars and how politics is shaping and being shaped by various online tribes. The title comes from the name given to normal people in some online chatrooms, particularly Read more…
Some of my favourite science fiction novels of recent years have featured augmented reality in one form or another: Pattern Recognition by Willam Gibson, Halting State by Charlie Stross, and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. I liked the ideas so much that I’ve been thinking about the legal implications of Read more…
This is not a post about Gamergate. I have been trying to stay out of the Gamergate discussion from the start, mostly because having missed a big part of the controversy, it has become increasingly more difficult to understand exactly what is going on, but also because I suspect that the Read more…
In “The Lonely End of a Cyberjunkie” (paywall), The Sunday Times all but blames games like World of Warcraft for the death of Robin Williams. The article says: “On the surface, Williams had everything: a beautiful wife and three children he adored, multiple homes and shares in his late brother’s Read more…
The UK Government’s senior adviser in intellectual property issues, MP Mike Weatherley, has made the news by suggesting that theft of articles in online environments should be prosecuted just like theft in the real world. He asked the following question to Mike Penning, Minister of State for Policing: “To ask Read more…
This weekend there was a sports event which was watched by 10,000 people live at a sports arena in Seattle, boasted millions of viewers online, was shown on ESPN, and the winners won an astounding $5 million USD. This was not golf, basketball, football or baseball, this was the final Read more…
I have been playing World of Warcraft again in preparation for the forthcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion (two words: panda monks!). For years I played in European servers the same character, an Alliance Human mage who then switched sides and joined the Horde as a Blood Elf, and finally settled Read more…