interviewing gamasutra and archiving monotonik..

So, more seemingly exciting and/or random stuff going on, as follows.

Firstly, I'm going to be doing a pretty-much regular monthly interview series for Gamasutra, the online part of Game Developer magazine, after the Chris Crawford interview I did a few weeks back. The first of these interviews is with Valve writer Marc Laidlaw, who is a former cyberpunk author, and contributed greatly to the wonderful Half-Life and its upcoming sequel - I also have only good things to say about his novelization of the 'Gadget' CD-ROM, a neglected but beautiful book. Anyhow, look out for that sometime in the next few weeks..

In other news, I'm delighted to announce that the Internet Archive has gone live with its addition of our net.label, Monotonik, as part of their audio archives. So you can go there, download our releases via a variety of methods, comment on them, and generally be happy. As you may know, I help out there with a digitized book collection and software archiving research, but I'm not forcing the collection on them through extreme nepotism - they were looking for any test collection to expand their audio archive, so it turns out Monotonik was a good test case. Yay.

Finally, I'm pleased that this Slashdot post of mine about violence and videogames has got a lot of attention, at least in the comments, and hopefully, at some point, in the wider media. When I read the story in the San Jose Mercury News yesterday morning, it said nothing about the fact the videogame connection had been made by an outspoken videogame critic and litigator, and honestly, I'm not sure I believe him at all, especially as the game is a tiny, broken, browser-based fantasy RPG. It saddens me when problems of (imho) gun control are translated into problems with media - but that's spoken as a true Brit who doesn't really understand why anyone should have guns, except possibly a SWAT team and Solid Snake.