Earlier I posted about how electronic devices can really disrupt meetings. Now Richard Curtis over at [e-reads] has a post discussing Christine Pearson’s book which goes into detail on why overuse of these distraction devices causes poor work performance.
Worth reading, especially for those of you who still believe mobile devices allow you to ‘get more [...]

This is a short post, one of several where I’ll toss out an idea or two to (maybe) help people get their foot in the door of the game’s industry.
Technical Skills
It does not matter what role you want to play for a game developer — storyboard artist, animator, writer, or producer — honing your [...]

The Day My Horse Died
There’s a drive from several studios in the videogames industry to start building emotional experiences, hoping to hook player’s into storylines and franchises by using more sophisticated storytelling methods. Many of these, like the detailed movie-eque conversation systems that the Mass Effect franchise use have achieved significant strides in this area. [...]

Bugs in software suck. Essential features not working as expected, bad. Needed but missing features, frustrating.
But the worst thing a piece of software can do is destroy your data. Over the years I’ve had stories corrupted by Word, ideas ‘disappeared’ in OneNote, and too many database nightmares.
So when I wrote the writing platform YourOtherMind [...]

So way back when I was involved in meetings a disturbing trend was beginning to develop. Now its no secret that I don’t like people using their portable electronic devices (cellphones, pds, ipods, et cetera) when engaged in person-to-person social interactions but the use of such devices during meetings could actually send me [...]

So the other day I received an e-mail from an editor, the contents of which are unimportant. But what is important is that the editor did a carbon copy of the email to dozens of other authors (using the cc field).

So?

The problem with this is that I now have the e-mail addresses for a [...]

Over at IGN games there is an editorial discussing whether franchises are killing videogames. It is an interesting discussion, the idea that as gaming companies become more conservative and focus on ‘tried and true’ franchises, they stifle creativity.
There’s some measure of truth to that and I do agree that franchises drown out ’shelf and mind [...]

I’ve been offering some advice to a few people who are interested in working for a gaming company and I figured I’d might as well summarize what I’ve told them.
Are You Sure?
First, I think someone wanting to enter the industry must be sure that this is something they want. Thinking that the job is going [...]

I’m not an impulse buyer in realspace… I plan my purchases and save up for things, all responsibly like, but when I’m on the Internet and I see something I want, I’ll buy it immediately… as long as the site takes payment via PayPal. And there’s little that I dislike more (in my online life [...]

Reading an article discussing some google mail features that recently ‘passed’, I was reminded of several organizational tricks that I’ve been using over the years. This little bit of nostalgia is specific to e-mail but probably applies more generally.
Basically the one feature that caught my eye in the article is that google mail (gmail) automatically [...]