Forbes writer Paul Tassi’s Fanboy Wars focuses on the fifteen-year span between the early 2000s and today’s gaming empire and the intense impact “fanboys” have had. It details the beginning of the Sony and Microsoft living room war to Facebook’s $2 billion Oculus acquisition. This quick 70-odd page read acts as a great refresher for those with interest in the space and a primer for those looking to familiarize themselves with the modern industry while trimming the fat of history.

Following the likes of Jane McGonigal, Tassi needs face-time to preach the power behind fanboyism. His ideas are a realization that today there exists a single community manifesting great power in an unlikely place; a community that can course correct multi-billion dollar companies yet heartless enough to lay waste to its own kind. While only the tip of the iceberg, I fear that the book will only fall on a choir of gaming peace-keepers and business types rolling their eyes at the idealism found in the pages.

My one large critique of Fanboy Wars is Tassi’s neglect to mention the seemingly poisoned and downtrodden heart of the industry: Developers. While he spend much time lamenting over harsh criticism developers receive from fanboys, he skips over the harsh reality developers face in studio turnover. His miss at the potential upside of Xbox One’s DRM for industry devs leaves his argument a bit unbalanced. Whether or not Microsoft’s original DRM strategy would have been a boon against the industry’s continuous and tragic staff up/layoff pattern remains to be seen, but even a brief adage about the potential benefits to a new console experience would have been refreshing. Hopefully this insight will be saved for Tassi’s next piece.

All told, Tassi mustered up a quick, easy-to-digest summary of today’s gaming world. While his grander message is a realization of the incredible power in oft-scorned fanboyism, Fanboy Wars doesn’t offer much depth for those already harboring intense focus on the industry; however, the book works as a great catch-up for new comers to the industry. Here’s to hoping that Fanboy Wars is a prelude to a something greater.

Jordan Shapiro, Forbes: E3 From A Father’s Perspective

A great run down of Nintendo’s E3 offerings. It sounds more and more like the Big N stole the show, and without a live press event mind you.

Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian:

[Björk’s] initiative, funded by the Nordic Council, is designed to be non-academic and has already been used in an informal way in Iceland. In an interview with the Observer magazine to be published next week , she said the programme had been “really popular with kids who have ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] or dyslexia” because it gets away from the classroom-bound, traditional nature of the Icelandic curriculum. “Unfortunately, it means we have to sit down and write a curriculum, and that’s a contradiction.”

Biophilia was such a brave and ambitious project ( I expect nothing less of Björk). Stellar news.

Tracey Lien, Polygon:

[Takashi] Tezuka told Polygon the people on the tools team typically don’t design video game courses — they only build the tools for Nintendo’s game designers to use. In this particular instance, the tools team was working on a Mario course editing tool when they decided to pitch it to Tezuka as a standalone game.

The Wii U GamePad + TV is effectively a gigantic Nintendo DS. Nintendo found success in the interactive second screen experience of the DS. Mario Maker seems like a great way to push the GamePad. Rather than pushing a passive off-screen experience, taking a note from the DS is a fantastic idea.

Aside from unboxing my Wii U, I had completely glossed over the GamePad stylus.

Scott Benson, animator of Night in the Woods, as quoted by Polygon:

I think working with animal characters, which is something I’ve done in animation work for years, you can identify with it a bit better. If we had made Mae a really specific person with a specific ethnicity and weight, and all this different stuff…

I think a lot of people can see themselves in Mae. If we were hyper-specific with our humanoid characters, it becomes more and more exclusive. There is something really inclusive about more abstracted humans.

When people draw fan art of Mae, everyone makes her look different. They make her look like themselves. That’s exactly what we want.

I had a lot of trouble writing Splatoon. I’m still not sure it delivers the intended message, or is any good for that matter.

I started with the nugget that games can simply be games, ignoring the fact that the slight variance in asexual character design could be implied as male or female. This thought led me down a rabbit hole. If gender can be construed, what about skin tone, ethnicity, sexuality, political ideals, spirituality? Where does it stop?Humanoid character design, however slight, is a delicate thing.