George Kokoris, who is stereoblind, on perceiving volume for the first time while playing a Nintendo 3DS:

Not only was I “seeing into the screen” the way so many others feel when playing a 3DS for the first time, I was seeing in a direction that had previously been literally invisible to me. It’s difficult to come up with a metaphor. Maybe it’s what Gomez saw the first time he spun the world in Fez. Maybe you can remember the first time you lay on the grass at night, looked up at the stars, and realized you weren’t looking up at all, because there is no “up”, and you were suddenly aware of being attached to the surface of a tiny sphere rolling through a vast emptiness.

I choked up a bit.

Michael Lowell on Learn to Counter:

This was the original attempt by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences to create an awards ceremony, and it is best described as a two-hour infomercial for “the future of Western video games”, the future of multimedia. It would prove such a failure that the AIAS web site makes no mention of Cybermania ‘94, only the Interactive Achievement Awards that would launch four years later and continue to this day. And after you become familiar with the second-rate actors, bad comedy, and inconsistent selection process that define this relic within the failed multimedia revolution, you’ll realize that the Spike Video Game Awards sucked long, long before they were a conception.

The post has an enormous play-by-play of the whole thing, as well as a video of it. I can’t even begin to list individual components of the show, as that would do a grave injustice to the spectacle of the thing. It distills the early 1990s into just two hours.

And now, a work of staggering genius: Cary Walkin’s Arena.Xlsm, which is a procedurally generated RPG made in Microsoft Excel.

• This is all in a Microsoft Excel workbook.

I can’t even play it because it only works on the Windows version of Excel, but I’m still linking to it anyway.

Here’s an entry from the 1.1 changelog, because video game changelogs are usually pretty funny:

• Alec Trevelyan will no longer respawn indefinitely when killed while exhausted.

Ryan Smith writing in The Gameological Society:

Tapping the High Kick, Low Kick, Low Punch, and High Punch buttons in quick succession at the end of a match prompts a victorious character, such as lightning-fingered “cybermercenary” A.C. Current, to drop his pants. As a canned fart noise plays, A.C. craps out a whole roasted turkey in the direction of his cowed opponent. The platter of meat multiplies into a dozen more turkeys, and the flying fowls bounce both competitors into the air.

“Happy Thanksgiving” is only one of several ass-centric combat moves in Tattoo Assassins. Another fatality involves shooting flames from said orifice to engulf a defeated enemy. Billy Two-Moons—a Native American character so offensively stereotypical he makes the Washington Redskins mascot look culturally sensitive—can summon a fiery Phoenix to fly out of his chest and take a green acidic shit over the head of his opponents, dissolving them into a pool of ooze. Billy celebrates with a war dance and chants “Hey-ya, hey-ya, hey-ya!”

Joe Kaminkow, the engineer who was the creative lead on Tattoo Assassins, doesn’t apologize for its legacy. “I think it had the first deaths by diarrhea or farts ever in video games,” he told me in an interview. “All I can say is, we had no good taste, no good decorum, and no good style. There almost wasn’t anything that was off limits.”

This is a really, really well written piece. Don’t miss it.

Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku:

The 2013 Game Developers Conference is over. The chatter of the show floor has faded, the bathroom lines have evaporated, and the various stacked hangovers have worn off. The week still feels like something of a blur, but squint your eyes just so, filter out the noise and the music and the glowing laptop monitors, and a theme starts to take shape: Change is in the air. Change for the better.

If I had to boil the week down to one pithy phrase, I suppose I’d choose “We can do this better.” If I was given the opportunity to add a second phrase, it’d be “We can have our cake and eat it, too.”

Really great, in-depth, thoughtful write up. It’s going to take more than one GDC to effect real change but the zeitgeist certainly seems to be shifting. Exciting stuff.

Tech in Asia has translated a report by Chinese companies iResearch and QQ Games on the demographics and preferences of gamers in China. C. Custer writing and translating:

Mobile gaming is less popular with the youngsters than you might expect. Teen gamers spend more on up front fees and way less on in-game items than you’d think when listening to industry bigwigs blathering about “freemium” and the demise of the traditional pay-for-it-up-front game.

It’s pretty cool stuff.

Video game journalist (in actuality, not what passes for “journalism” in a lot of places) and generally excellent human being Leigh Alexander wrote a game in Twine:

Welcome to the Unofficial SXSW Game!

If you’ve never been to SXSW and are wondering what it’s like, this game is for you.

(I’ve never been to SXSW either, so this is just totally a guess.)

In this game you can increase your Klout score and wait nine hours in line to see Tard the Grumpy Cat before giving up, so as someone who has also never been to SXSW I can confirm it’s 100% completely accurate.

Gameranx:

You probably remember from May of last year the Tropes versus Women in Videogames campaign launched on Kickstarter by Feminist Frequency. A few weeks into funding, controversy erupted overnight at the mere thought that such a project might exist, amidst which a small group of fellows decided to organize a Tropes versus Men in Videogames campaign on Indiegogo in June by way of a retort.

While I didn’t back Tropes vs Women in Video Games on Kickstarter, I had been following the project on its way to the release of the first video earlier this month. I hadn’t heard a single thing about this protest campaign, though, which I guess is not surprising because they only raised about $3,000.

It took eight months from the end of the Kickstarter campaign for Anita Sarkeesian to release the first Tropes video, so a common complaint among project detractors was that it was a scam. This makes it patently hilarious that it’s the Tropes vs Men organizer(s?) who appear to have taken the money and ran. Read on about Gameranx’s research into where the money went.