International Hobo’s founder Chris Bateman is at Develop Brighton this year with a talk entitled What Players Want: Understanding Player Diversity. This session is a culmination of more than a decade of work in player satisfaction modelling (not to mention game design experience from fifty published games), and presents a new way of understanding the psychology of videogames in terms of Player Motives. As well as helping clarify effective videogame design, the model can help studios make tough commercial decisions about which audiences they can or should be pursuing with a specific design concept.

For more details, see Chris’ speaker page at the Develop conference website.

How often do you go out without your smartphone? What’s the longest you’ve gone without the internet?
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, we have become cyborgs – human-machine hybrids. Whether it’s Facebook selling our personal data to be ‘weaponised’ by Cambridge Analytica, or Google suggesting answers to questions like “are women evil?” to people who asked for no such thing, our lives are affected by the machines we are living with. Cybernetic networks are all around us – and thinking about ‘neutral tools’ is no longer helpful. You’re already a cyborg… join us to help find out what would make a good cyborg!

Thursday 10th May 2018, 6:30 pm to 9 pm

Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, 2-4 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NU - order your free tickets here!

• 6:30 pm Are You A Good Cyborg?
  Game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman takes us on a journey through the strange world we now live in, asking what the good life might look like for us cyborgs.
• 7:30 pm Cyborg Living Panel
  Lively debate about our relationship with technology, the internet, robots, and machines.

A special night as part of of Justin Robertson’s “It’s Alive!” Exhibition, and Book Launch Event for Chris Bateman’s new book The Virtuous Cyborg, from Squint Books. Order your free tickets here!

Zelda Facets was a six part serial that examined The Legend of Zelda franchise in terms of the key elements of the franchise and how these came to be subverted in Breath of the Wild. The serial ran from February 21st to March 28th 2018. Each of the parts ends with a link to the next one, so to read the entire serial, simply click on the first link below, and then follow the “next” links to read on.

The six parts are as follows:

1. Introduction
2. Link
3. Hyrule
4. Weapons
5. Horses
6. Zelda

I would like to extend especial thanks to my friend and colleague Richard Boon for a great many illuminating discussions about Zelda’s structure and play aesthetics over several decades, many of which helped form the arguments in this serial.

If you enjoyed this serial, please leave a comment!