Weekly Links #13

Yikes! I open up the file, very late, to discover that I only have two links for last week. Well, three actually. Which may just turn into four. Funny how the best ideas come to you in retrospect. Anyway...

The general gaming news consist of Shamus Young over at Escapist Magazine pointing out how Steam blows the current generation of consoles out of the water in terms of popularity, and surpasses every single console of the previous generation, too. All of a sudden, the console wars seem pretty pointless and pathetic, don't they? Indeed, the most interesting happenings these days are in the PC world, where for example the Unreal Engine is being open sourced. Presumably under increased pressure from Unity? Your guess is as good as mine, and probably better.

On a different note, Jay Barnson of Rampant Games fame summarizes a recent scandal I didn't exactly follow. It seems that some big company heard of these newfangled game jams and wanted a piece of the pie. So they spent a ridiculous amount of money setting up a grand show that was going to be televised. Lo and behold, one of the producers mistook a bunch of indie gamedevs for the sort of people who appear in reality TV shows, and made some exceedingly sexist comments.

Now, you may have heard that sexism in the tech world, and especially game development, is a major problem, mostly because a lot of people refuse to acknowledge it. But in this case, all the participants reacted like one and walked off the show. Which is at the same time a rare display of solidarity, the breaking of a nasty trend AND a slap to the ugly face of corporate mentality.

So, good signs for the future.

I'll end with a few news from the world of interactive fiction, which has been a distant one for me as of late. The XYZZY Awards took place on Sunday (and for once I wasn't there), and just a day later the venerable Interactive Fiction Competition got a brand new website that looks like something from this decade for a change. And speaking of this decade in IF, here's an ongoing series of posts about Twine by a recent convert. So things are moving forward.

And that's pretty much it for now. See you next time, with hopefully more links.