So the cute-gay-dad couple that is Daniel Golding and Brendan Keogh (oh gosh this is how rumors start) have officially launched a swanky website and stuff for "Press Select," their publishing venture for long-form video game criticism. Each author will follow Keogh's example in dedicating one whole book to one game. (It's not announced or anything, but I already called shotgun on Half-Life 1.)
My peers (announced so far) in this thing are:
- Patricia Hernandez, of Kotaku and Nightmare Mode fame
- Michael Abbott, the man behind The Brainy Gamer
- Maddy Myers, freelance critic for various outlets including Paste and formerly The Boston Phoenix.
- Chris Dahlen, critic, co-founder and former editor of Kill Screen, and writer on Klei’s Mark of the Ninja.
- Tim Rogers, game critic for ActionButton.net and founder and director of Action Button Entertainment.
- Jason Killingsworth, features editor of Edge Magazine.
- Jenn Frank, game critic, formerly of EGM and 1UP, Editorial Director at Unwinnable, and voice of Super Hexagon
Right now I'm just working on a rough outline and scribbling a bunch of notes. If you want a sneak preview of the material, you can attend one of three upcoming conferences. Each one will be pretty different and talk about different things and aspects of Half-Life 1 and other games, but they'll all be emblematic of a similar argument: that Half-Life 1's legacy of pioneering "in-game scripted narrative" has resulted in the crappiness of military FPS shooters today, and it overshadows what's actually a very finely tuned arcade-ish shooter -- and as with anything, there are politics and tensions embedded within an arcade shooter.
The conferences I'm speaking at are:
- 14-15 September: No Show Conference @ Microsoft NERD Center. Boston, MA. ($100 / scholarships available)
- 26-27 October: Queerness and Games Conference @ UC Berkeley. Berkeley, CA. (free)
- 15-17 November: Practice @ NYU Game Center. New York, NY. ($100-$350)
