Changing the World gets the High Score!

So I consider myself a bit of a gamer. Not a usual gamer - I don't tend to play first-person shooters, I have little interest in big-franchise games (except Watch Dogs, because that's awesome. Oh, and Titanfall) and I'm more interested in art, story and character than gameplay.

But here's the thing: I've been reading about games too. And it turns out, games have the power to change the world.

How to Break a Dragon's heart

I want to go on record here, right now, and say that at present I prefer Dreamworks to Disney Pixar. Yes, Pixar have had some great films, probably more than Dreamworks, but there's something about the way they handle themselves and the way they portray their characters that makes me wanna root for the guys at Dreamworks.

Oh, and in case you couldn't tell from the title and the opening, this is about How to Train Your Dragon 2.

A look at good games and "meh" games

I haven't been to see any movies recently, as you might have noticed, and that's partly why I've been branching out into book reviews and game reviews. These past coupla weeks I've been reading about game design and what makes a game good or addictive, so today I'm going to talk about a couple of games, one an example of what I consider good game design, and one I consider not-so-good game design.

Book Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Okay, so it's been two days.

And I've already finished another book.

To be fair, Jon Ronson's writing is very readable. The topics are often absurd, seemingly larger-than-life, but that's the sort of thing he becomes involved in. My first experience of his writing was with The Psychopath Test which was an interesting look at psychopathy and the traits which give it away, looking less at the condition itself (these are, again, more of those "popular science" books I love) and more at how it affects people and how people treat it. Likewise, this look at the US military and its more... shall we say, "unusual" tactics in warfare, is approached in typical Jon-Ronson-style from the strange angle of its PsyOps division, the shady area of army intelligence concerned with psychic viewing, new age thinking and, as the title of the book suggests, staring at goats. Yep, this is The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Book Review: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Today is a book post, in part because I haven't watched any new movies recently (or really in the past month at all) but also because books are something I love, but don't have the opportunity to talk about very often. Books are something I really ought to talk about here, being as my movie experience is very much based upon storytelling - a movie without a good story is not a good movie at all, people! - and being as I'm a creative writer (particularly poetry right now, but more on that in future). Reading is just something I do.

In particular, I love reading non-fiction; fiction is great and all, you get a wonderful sense of escapism and vast scale in a good fantasy or sci-fi, and the stories they tell can bring to light modern problems, even if they were written long ago. But as a kid I really grew up reading the Horrible Histories and Horrible Science books, I found them endlessly fascinating and amusing and I'm sure they're still a great influence on what I read, although now that quest for real-world information has turned to perusing the "Popular Science" and "Smart Thinking" sections in Waterstone's rather than the back-of-beyond dusty history sections in second-hand bookshops. But what I find there is still of great interest, particularly when I stumble upon something as engaging and informative as Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.