February Writing

A quick summary of the writing I did in February. As previously mentioned, I'll be writing less this year than I was last year. This is partly because I want to commit more time this year to my academic writing (both getting my PhD properly underway and hopefully getting some journal articles out the door) and also because I simply wasn't happy with the quality of my stuff when I was writing weekly pieces at multiple outlets. But even though I am writing less, I'm happier with the quality of the stuff I'm writing now, so that is good, and I have some ideas for some features I want to write in the coming months that I'm really excited about.

Anyway. Things I wrote. At Unwinnable I only have one piece this month. I wanted to look at this interesting thing that happens when I play games like Antichamber and Where Is My Heart?. Namely, I get really, really exhausted just from thinking. So I wrote about that.

At Games On Net I have two "You Know What I Love?" columns this month. The first one is about the Borderlands 2 enemy type, the Goliath, which I think is a really interesting enemy. The second one is about grinding as I've enjoyed it in several games I've been playing recently.

Also at Games On Net this month, I had the opportunity to head to Sydney for a Bioshock: Infinite press event. So I wrote a preview of that, which I'm fairly happy of (as far as previews go), and I also interviewed the game's Director of Design, Bill Gardner.

In February I decided to go back and give Dark Souls a second chance after failing miserably at it when it first came out. Subsequently, I've played the game for about fifty hours in a rather short period of time. I had lots of thoughts about how the game in general and the level design specifically communicate the world to the player as hostile and stand-off-ish. I put together these thoughts for my first even piece at Bit Creature, which is exciting.

Last month I had a "Places" piece in Edge about Skyrim's The Reach. It was republished online this month.

Earlier in the month I gave a very casual lecture about the term 'nongame' and why it is terrible and discriminatory. I wrote about it briefly here, and provided a link to the (not very good quality) recording of the (not very good quality) talk.

And that is all for this month. The only other news is that Killing is Harmless is now available on Kindle. You can purchase it from Gumroad to get the Kindle version along with the pdf and epub formats, or you can now also buy it for Kindle alone directly through Amazon.