Recent content by Doctor Professor

I don't know whether this was directed at me, but this is wholly irrelevant. Nobody's said anything negative about Taco or his work. Some have just said that it's a bad idea for the Escapist to put out a wholly fabricated story in their regular News feed. This reads like you are saying that...

If a trusted source lies to you, even if you probably should be able to figure it out, I don't think it's your fault if you don't. I don't think "actively misleads some percentage of its readers" is a good thing for a news site. Obviously I figured out this post wasn't true, or I...

I want to not have to know the current community jargon to be able to tell whether I am being lied to. I have never encountered the phrase "Taco News" before, and I've been an Escapist reader longer than PsychicTaco115 has existed as an account. "Taco News" still says "News" and in fact the only...

This is not "satire." This is lies. This is clickbait. This is irresponsible. This devalues the Escapist as a news source.

The Welcome Back rewards were separate and were redeemable basically immediately. They weren't part of the lawsuit; they were just something Sony did to generate some positive PR after the outage. The Class Action claim benefits were claimable last year (see https://psnsoesettlement.com/english/...

The confusion between challenge and punishment is pervasive, and it causes a lot of problems throughout the industry. I've written about it here: Test Skills, Not Patience: Challenge, Punishment, and Learning [http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/test-skills-not-patience-challenge.html]. In this...

Her name is "Marissa" and not "Melissa." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

A few people have said it's the gamer's attitude, or simply that they self-identify as hardcore. I think it's a combination of these things, though it does correlate with time/money/game-type. Ultimately, someone who is "hardcore" about some activity is someone who takes pride in their skill or...

I love seeing Star Ocean 2 getting some attention! And the deep relationship system is one if its best-realized, unique-or-close-to-it traits. I wrote about it a bit in one of my own articles [http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/09/play-me-story-part-two-what-makes.html], using it as an example of...

The Dueling Analogs post made me RAGE. So I thought hard about why attitudes like that exist - why people would object to the inclusion of optional accessibility-enhancing settings. I came up with a pretty good answer. It's too long for a forum, so it's over here: Status and Signals: Why...

This is an interesting idea - the focus on games as tools for collaborative storytelling in particular is fascinating. To me, the unique narrative power of videogames is the ability to tell stories about the audience - which no other medium can pull off anywhere near as well. I wrote about...

I think there's something major here - the difference between being hard, and wasting the player's time. This is actually something I've written about recently: Test Skills, Not Patience: Challenge, Punishment, and Learning...

As someone transitioning from wisher to writer (Plug! Here's my weekly blog: Pixel Poppers [http://www.pixelpoppers.com]) I found this article very uplifting. Thank you, Sean, for this and for all the other quality articles of yours I've had the pleasure to read.

It's so saddening when a game is almost wonderful. Such a waste. I felt that way about Bionic Commando. I call those Bad Good Games [http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/09/spoiled-treasures-and-guilty-pleasures.html].

Shamus, I'm not sure if you've seen Bob Chipman's video about the videogame violence controversy [http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2009/06/finals-episode-25-violence-is-golden.html], but I think you'd find it interesting. I actually referenced that video in a recent blog post (that also...