07.06.08
Posted in games, work, writing at 4:47 pm by Rob Fahey
Unsurprisingly, I produced a couple of Blizzard-related features this week along with the usual batch of reviews and whatnot. I previously alluded to my piece for The Times, which was my first published work with the paper - if you fancy having a read but didn’t pick up the paper, you can see it online here: The WoW Factor.
I’ve got another piece appearing in tomorrow’s Times, so they must have liked the first one.
Also on the topic of Blizzard, I wrote an editorial this week for Eurogamer and GamesIndustry.biz which explored how the company’s unique “confessional” approach to talking to its audience has played a major role in making them into such a successful developer. Pop over and have a read if you like: Blizzard’s Perfect Storm.
(Sorry, this blog has gone all work-related again. I’m sure I’ll have another political opinion to hold forth upon soon enough - especially as the by-election in Howden & Haltemprice approaches…)
Technorati Tags: Eurogamer, gaming, journalism, MMORPG, The Times, videogames, workblog, World of Warcraft
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01.31.08
Posted in games, politics, writing at 1:44 am by Rob Fahey
A couple of weeks back, Britain’s embattled (and increasingly forlorn-looking, as fellow closeted BBC Parliament fans will have noted) Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, took up the standard of the battle against the single threat to our country’s youth. Not the erosion of their civil liberties, or the crumbling of the economy that’s meant to sustain them; not even drugs, or alcohol, or terrorism. This vile and pernicious threat is, of course, videogames.
Brown parroted elements of the spiel of his repellently false opponent, David Cameron, in calling for videogame makers to ban knives from their games - essentially saying that they should accept responsibility for the recent spate of highly-reported knife crime among youths in Britain’s cities, especially around London.
I wrote a fairly lengthy feature on the matter for GamesIndustry.biz, which pretty much sums up my own view on it. In the wake of that, I was contacted by the Evening Standard, who wanted me to write a short piece outlining my perspective on the debate.
Although I spent quite a while working the piece into the word counts they requested, they didn’t publish it in the end - and rather rudely, didn’t even bother dashing off a quick mail to apologise for wasting my time. Being that the Standard is an odious, biased and unpleasant rag at the best of times, I’m not entirely surprised - I got the impression that they had contacted me purely because I was one of the few game writers who made a point of seeing both sides to the whole Manhunt 2 banning story, and were disappointed to find that this doesn’t translate to being enough of a fool to think playing videogames is what’s making members of violent gangs stab one another in South London.
Anyway, in case anyone is interested, here’s what was going to be published. Shame, really - I was quite looking forward to slagging off old Gordy in the national press. Some other time, maybe.
It’s very disappointing that Gordon Brown would try to make videogames into a scapegoat for London’s youth crime. It’s a cheap political trick to point the finger at a soft target like videogames, instead of accepting responsibility for the difficult, complex roots of this problem.
I don’t think for a moment that a politician as experienced as Mr Brown really believes that we’re going to solve violent crime by taking some videogames off the shelves. He knows that what’s really needed is to tackle the thorny questions of deprivation, social integration, drug policy and policing - but videogames make for a nice, distracting soundbite and take the heat off for a few days.
There is definitely a debate to be had about violent videogames, but Mr Brown’s comments aren’t helpful. We need to look at the enforcement of age ratings, and make sure that retailers are sticking to them. We need to make sure that parents know what their children are playing, and can control their access to unsuitable material.
The research into the effect of violent games on people’s behaviour is very inconclusive - but even in the absence of a clear answer, I think most people, including those inside the games industry, agree that children’s access to violent media should be controlled. We already have a great age rating system, but there’s a lot of work to be done on that, and the Government needs to be working with the industry to ensure that children are protected, rather than just pointing fingers.
The tragedy of knife and gun crime among young people in London shouldn’t even be part of this debate. There’s no evidence of any kind of link with videogames - but plenty of evidence that links these crimes to social problems like drugs, underage drinking, poverty and poor social integration. London needs to hear Mr Brown’s plans to tackle those problems - not just empty allegations of blame and cheap soundbites.
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12.19.07
Posted in writing at 2:50 am by Rob Fahey
It’s quarter to two in the morning. I’ve been tweaking the wording of a feature for a couple of hours, and I just leaned back in my chair to contemplate a paragraph that’s really annoying me. I don’t normally spend this long fiddling with wording, but I’ve got insomniac tendencies at the moment.
No sooner had I leaned back, than the Demoness Cat launched herself bodily from floor level right onto my chest, causing me - I regret to say - to shriek like a small girl with a stubbed toe. Offended, she promptly meowed at me, slapped me in the nose with her paw, and leapt off again to stroll off in a sulk.
Bloody animal is trying to kill me ever since I foiled her daring break for freedom (diving through my legs while I was talking to someone at the door) earlier today, I swear it.
Technorati Tags: cat, Tia
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08.18.07
Posted in writing at 2:10 am by Rob Fahey
I have returned, physically unscathed if mentally disquieted, from my sojourn in Ireland. I’ve come back with a fair chunk of work done on some fiction I’ve been writing for a long time, which is a Very Good Thing. Of late, my ambition to actually finish a book has been classified somewhere next to my ambition to win the lottery in terms of likelihood. Suddenly it all feels back on track, to some extent.
Unusually, I also ended up writing some short form fiction in Ireland - inspired by a sleepless night in a cottage on the Atlantic fringe of Galway, when rain, wetly slapping tarpaulins, screeching foxes and childhood memories of an abandoned village just up the coast all conspired with my fertile imagination to produce both insomnia, and inspiration, in fairly equal measures.
I have uploaded the results of my labours here for your perusal and, hopefuly, pleasure.
In the cold light of day, I’m fairly happy with this as a story - sufficiently so that I’m pondering sending it to a couple of magazines which publish horror fiction. It’s a pretty traditional ghost story in structure, I guess, and that’s not something I’m familiar with writing. Any comments or feedback would be greatly appreciated, bearing in mind that while praise is always welcome, criticism is always more useful!
Technorati Tags: fiction, short story, writing
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02.15.07
Posted in web, writing at 12:53 am by Rob Fahey
Well, I do. The evidence is pretty much undeniable.
Actually, I’ve been fucking around with WordPress for some time now, but never actually got around to putting it “live” so to speak. Still, everyone else has one of these things, and the opportunity to vent opinions that nobody will pay me to publish is certainly appealing. Much of whatever I scrawl here will probably end up duplicated across my LiveJournal and maybe even, god forbid, my MySpace - but it’s my little chunk of the blogging revolution, god damn it, and that’s what counts. So there.
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