Recent content by Colin Rowsell

What Hulk Hogan Taught Videogames Professional wrestling has portrayed clear-cut villains for over a hundred years. Colin Rowsell examines the history of faces and heels in pro wrestling and how its simple storytelling techniques inform videogames. Read Full Article

Your Job Is to Fall In Love There are plenty of good storytellers who have spent years mastering their craft. But the difference between good artists and great ones often comes down to enthusiasm. Colin Rowsell shares his experience at an animation conference last year, where a former Muppeteer...

Get a Life Star Trek gave us phasers, warp drives and a host of alien cultures. But its most enduring legacy might be the image of Trekkies themselves. Colin Rowsell discusses the toxic influence that hardcore fans can have on their beloved entertainment property. Read Full Article

A Risk of Romance If videogame publishers want to extend their reach beyond the standard 18- to 34-year-old male demographic, they may want to form development teams with fewer gamers and more romance novelists. Colin Rowsell exhorts game developers to inject some fresh ideas into the design...

SHAMAN If you have trouble comprehending a world without instant access to a nearly infinite amount of information, think of how hard it would be to comprehend the internet in a world where it never existed. Colin Rowsell imagines the World Wide Web as one man's cryptic dream - and his...

The Family Gathering Survival Kit Extended family members giving you grief this Christmas? Colin Rowsell has some tips on how videogames can help you cope. Read Full Article

Pixels and Picket Lines Videogames have been a useful tool for politicians for decades now, first as a scapegoat and now as a vehicle for reaching an elusive demographic. So why haven't they taken a stand of their own? Read Full Article

Character Creation "I can still remember my own first encounter, at a slightly older age than Miles' but no less formative: a vast shape waiting patiently, something big and flat, something else big and lumpy, with coils and lights. Someone guided my stubby hand to a lump and helped me whack...

Sidhe's the One "A Sidhe is an earthen mound where mythical beings live. It's also an independent New Zealand videogame company that's moved away from the hill-dwelling fairy thing to release six titles in the last five years. I've known about them for a long while: Like fantasy films...

Tijuana Time "Tijuana bibles were Depression-era smut booklets, eight-page comics on cheap paper that gave you the real lives of the rich and famous. You too, my friend, can finally see Donald sweeping Daisy's chimney. J. Wellington Wimpy laying the pipe to Olive Oyl. You can find out once and...

Love Sucks and Then You Evolve "I didn't know what to expect from my brief affair with television, but I knew it wouldn't all be long walks on the beach and playing kissy-face. For a start, I've known television my whole life. I've suckled the great glass teat since I was a toddler, and TV has...

How To Bite The Head Off a Chicken "It's small by overseas standards - this isn't ComicCon - and there's an extra emphasis on kids. Downstairs they go batshit for the laser tag and wrestling; upstairs there are long avenues of Magic: The Gathering tables. One of Armageddon's biggest moments...

A Wink is as Good as a Pixelated Nipple "Games have gotten very good at guns, physics, audio and graphics that leave the real world looking low-res. Off to the side and down a few alleys, they're also pretty good at porn. I like these things, all of them, not to mention bouncing around like a...

How to Cheer Yourself Up "You know what's hilarious? All the sad buggers. People who live in the richest countries in the history of the world; with cheap food and free porn; where syphillis, typhoid and rat plagues are no longer the usual ways to die; with endless entertainment and all kinds...

The Wages of Stupidity are Personal Development "I've been a sportsman since I was 3 years old and got hit on the head with a rugby ball. This is a rite of passage in New Zealand - if you haven't lost at least a few brain cells to the Great Game, you're a bit funny. Possibly a girl or a...