Disconnected Updates.

Hello. It has been a pretty intense, trans-pacific, grits-fuelled couple of weeks. Here is a rundown of important and exciting and disconnected things I've been up to:

1. Dan Golding and I launched our own company. It is called Press Select, and it is a publishing label for long-form game criticism. We have some truly incredible authors lined up to write about some landmark games. We wrote a blog post to tell you more about what we are doing, or you can read the article Polygon wrote about us.

2. I travelled to Atlanta, Georgia to attend the 2013 DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) conference last week. It is games studies' biggest international journal, and was full of awesome papers by intelligent people. It was a pretty great week! I am utterly indebted to Cameron Kunzelman for putting me up for the week so I could actually afford to attend. I presented a paper drawing from my work with Killing is Harmless. It is about Spec Ops: The Line, genre conventions of the military shooter genre, and how the genre gets caught up in the military-entertainment complex. There's a full version of the paper available here if you are into that.

3. Michael Brough's 868-Hack (pictured) was released on the App Store. I've been playing the pre-release build for a couple of months, and it is one of my favourite games of the year. I'll have more to say about it in the future, but for now I'll just note that it is responsible for breaking my Animal Crossing addiction as it started to dominate my portable gaming time.

And that is that!