The Sunday Papers

Another Sunday, another compilation of diverse thoughtful matters to digest as you're digesting sunday lunch. Not that I'm having sunday lunch. I'm having the chili I made last night. Which... yeah, the problem is we can get off topic, so best to rush through these thinky-things before I start trying to work out whether a band can actually sound as good as they look or something else irrelevant.

• Firstly, Internet Superstar (apparently) Shawn Elliot of 1UP chats in a postmortemly fashion with Valve about Orange Box. Mentioned mainly because Walker's lunacy gets namechecked.
• Over at Gamasutra, Russell Carroll of Reflexive talks about the piracy rate in the casual space. 92% of copies of Ricochet Infinity were pirated. Blimey. However, where it gets even more interesting is their analysis of the effects of DRM. Effectively, they have to annihilate 1000 pirate copies to net a single Sale. Blimey again.
• Over at Gamers With Jobs, Colleen Hannon talks about her return to PC Gaming. ONE OF US. ONE OF US. Meanwhile, Eurogamer's Rob Fahey on Why PCs Aren't Dead... they're just CHANGING. Which makes me think of Caterpillars transmuting into mini-gun wielding butterflies, so I like that.
• Columns by game designers! Cliff Harris of Positech (Democracy, Kudos, RPS Comments Threads) writes about the curse of genre. Meanwhile, I notice Next Gen are reprinting Edge's Randy Smith (Return to the Haunted Cathedral, The Cradle, other stuff) columns. This one's about the A-word.. You know the one - rhymes with smart.
• Imperial Creed mailed me a while back, asking if I could get hold of a PDF copy of my The Girl Who Wanted To be God piece on AI-hottie Shodan for a piece for his English masters. I - er - never got around to it, but he did the piece anyway. It's called How "Thinking With Portals Changes Everything: Half-Life 2, Portal, and Feminist Literary Theory in Video Games".
• Seriously - Ipso Facto look like this. Their austere Garage-psych is neat enough, but doesn't stand a chance.

Failed.