Writing

Articles

I write frequently about games, game design, and game industry business issues for publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal Interactive, Salon, and Game Developer magazine.

Click here for links to just about every non-fiction piece I've written in the last decade, and some older pieces, too.

Death to the Games Industry: Long Live Games: Long screed on what I see as the central creative challenge facing the game industry as a whole--and how we may be able to solve it. Part Two is here. (The Escapist, 2005.)
Where Stories End and Games Begin: Because games and stories are, in some sense, antitheses, designing at their intersection is both perilous and productive of a number of interesting game styles.(Game Developer magazine, 2000.)
New Front in the Copyright Wars: Out-of-Print Computer Games: "Pirates" who put out-of-print console and computer games up on the Web should be thanked, not pilloried; they're doing a service to game designers and scholars. But we need to find a legal way for this to happen. (New York Times, 2000.)
Games Don't Kill People--Do They?: What role does violence play in gaming? Are modern computer games obsessed with violence? Does violence in gaming breed violence in the streets? Do critics who maintain that game violence spurred the massacre at Littleton have a point? (Salon, 1999)
Don't Be a Vidiot: What computer game designers can learn from non-electronic games. (Game Developer's Conference, 1999)
Dani Bunten Berry: A tribute to the computer gaming pioneer, who died in 1998. (Happy Puppy, 1998)
"I Have No Words & I Must Design": Toward a critical vocabulary of game design. (Interactive Fantasy magazine, 1994)

An Introduction to Mobile Game Development: An overview of the technologies and design considerations for mobile game developers.
An Introduction to the Mobile Game Business: Essential information for business people, marketers, and producers working in or considering entering the mobile game business.
Multiplayer Mobile Games: Business Challenges And Opportunities: The problems involved in developing and operating multiplayer mobile games, and a look at several developers who are successfully doing so today.
Designing Single-Player Mobile Games: This document discusses theoretical and practical issues in the design of single-player games for mobile devices.

The Future of Online Games: An analyst's report on the online games industry, written in 2000 for Creative Good. Click above to download it; it's a 675k zipped Word file. It originally sold for hundreds of dollars.

First Contract: Now available (in both paperback and hardcover).
When the aliens came, Johnson Mukerjii lost everything. His company, his Jag, his mansion, his expensive and oh so treacherous wife.
The economy went to hell. Earth just couldn't compete with the aliens. Why buy a Mercedes when you can get a flying car that can accelerate to the speed of sound in under 60 seconds? Or a Pentium III, when you can buy a friendly, joke-cracking artificial intelligence with the processing power of a million Crays? Unemployment soon hit 50%, and the Dow Jones clunked around in low double digits amid the greatest business bust since the Fall of Rome.
Then Mukerjii had his brainstorm. The only competitive advantage Earth had was cheap labor. We needed to be like Taiwan: to make ticky-tacky pieces of mass-disposable crap for export to the stars....
Click here to order from Amazon.com. (Or better yet, buy it at your local independent bookstore.)

"Bright Light, Big City": What would you do if terrorists had a nuke in your home town? (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1991)
"High On Life": The war on drugs can be won--but at what cost? (Analog, November 1992)
"A Doe, In Charcoal": My grandfather's house was haunted... perhaps. (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1992)
"Can a White Boy Sing the Blues?": What if you could change your race? (Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1993)