Weekly Links #5

As the year is picking up, so do the gaming news. It's good to have a newsletter that's not short on links for a change, so let me just dive into it.

First, of course, comes the big news of the week: after the Sim City debacle last year, EA is yet again trying to rip off gamers, and falling flat on their faces, judging by the typical review. Newsflash: even the dumbest consumers have a limit. Push them too hard, and you're not going to like how much they overreact, after putting up with your crap for too long already. Wanna bet how many more blows like that the big producers need before they start getting a clue?

And while speaking of dollar-eyed execs, here's an entertaining account of the fate awaiting those who keep chasing the mirage of "the next World of Warcraft". In unrelated news, we have some musings on what makes exploration fun. And also for game developers, but not only, the inventor of machinima writes about the intersection of game and movie technology, with an emphasis on procedural content.

While I'm off the beaten path, here's one for a more general gaming audience: Perils of the Lady Gamer, a 1920s-styled comic about the horribly sexist treatment women get as gamers and game developers in the modern world. As you might expect, it's not even remotely funny. Look up Anita Sarkeesian if this topic is foreign to you.

Not that women have a complete monopoly on receiving abuse from immature gamers. Both Polygon and Kotaku (and likely others as well) write about the strange case of Flappy Bird, a casual game for touchscreen devices, whose author has started receiving so much abuse after his runaway success that he's now pulling the game from stores. Clearly, a lot of people just can't stand others getting more attention than themselves, however well-deserved. And that's something we need to fix, or else we'll keep losing valuable creators -- the last thing we need in a field were we're mostly blundering in the dark already.

But that's it for this week. Sorry for ending on a negative note. Life's like that sometimes. Care to try and help fix it?