About Games Blog

At the end of 2016, I decided I didn't keep a very good log of the games I played throughout the year. I wrote a retrospective summary on Twitter—which I think contains most titles—but I'd like to keep a better log for 2017 (and the last week of 2016 because I was so excited to start this idea that I started early, shhh). So, here it is!

This game log will be updated throughout the year and include some basic information about the games I spend time with. I hope keeping this record encourages me to play more games, as it seems to be incredibly common for people in the games industry to spend all their time teaching, developing, and reviewing games, and rarely playing them for fun. I want to engage with games more, reflect on my experiences, and feel less guilty about the time I spend relaxing instead of working.

As such, I should point out that because this game log isn't 'work', it is therefore probably riddled with typos! If you'd like a better indication of my professional games writing, check it out here.

Two years ago, I wrote about my frustration with the only 'queerness in games' panel at PAX Australia 2015. My major issue with the panel was that it tried to cover too much in too little time—likely because it was the only panel of its nature at the convention.

Well, two years have passed and things have changed. PAX Australia 2017 had three panels discussing queerness in games, two about women, and one about representation more broadly... And yet, something still feels wrong, and I've been struggling to put my feelings into words since returning home a couple of weeks ago.

My GCAP 2017 talk with John Kane presented developers with new ways of considering accessibility, and offered a lot of practical tips. Here they are, in the form of an easy-to-use checklist. Now there's no excuse to avoid making your game a little more accessible!

I'm the type of person who takes photos of anything beautiful. I have a particular love of sunsets, but anything that inspires me—including forests, architecture, beaches, graffiti, the view from planes, galleries, aesthetically-pleasing roads, and people I love—will generally end up living in still images on my phone.

I'm not much different when I'm playing videogames. I'm currently watching my partner, Dakoda, play Final Fantasy XV and keep asking, 'Did you take a screenshot of that!' because I find videogame worlds so strikingly beautiful. This morning, I woke to David Rayfield's article about videogame aesthetics on my Twitter feed, and it made me realise that I had some simply beautiful experiences with videogames this year. Let me tell you about them.

This weekend, everybody seems to be playing Firewatch (myself included) and the experience is a divisive one. Firewatch is an experiential game that involves a lot of walking and interacting with the world—but not much else—and this has sparked the debate we have all heard before: is this style of game truly a ‘game’?