Laura Naviaux, Sony Online Entertainment’s senior VP of global sales and marketing:

SOE has prided itself on being a major catalyst of women’s involvement in our industry. As our company continues to evolve and diversify our portfolio, we’ve found it imperative to refine our approach with game art and development, seeking out varied perspectives from the current and future leading voices in the industry. The market for compelling and original online game experiences is rapidly evolving and as a publisher it is our responsibility to listen and celebrate the spectrum of play styles among our global community, and deliver innovation in art, design and technology.

Congrats to scholarship winner Erin Loelius.

Andrew Webster delivers Temple Run and Temple Run 2 joint analytics:

Alongside the milestone, Imangi also revealed a number of details about its audience, which helps to illustrate the changing landscape of mobile games. 60 percent of all players are female, for instance, and the game is most popular in China, which accounts for 36 percent of all downloads. The next largest market is the US at 21 percent.<

Changing landscape indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci6lMQNLKZU

Ben Kuchera, Polygon:

A trailer has one job: To sell you on the game. Its sole purpose is to move you closer to making a purchasing decision. It may ditch the game’s actual visuals for pre-rendered or even live-action footage, or live-action with so many special effects that it may as well be CG. It’s not there to give an accurate representation about the game, it’s there to get you to buy something. That’s it.

That’s what a trailer does from the point of view of the publisher, but as a player I want to learn something about the game. I don’t particularly care if the trailer uses in-game footage or not, a live-action trailer can just as easily tell us something about the tone and setting of the game using other means. Some of the Halo trailers, for instance, did a great job of setting up the scale of upcoming games and the sense of loss without showing much of the battles themselves. The “Believe” ad was a great trailer, as it told me something about the game. It got me interested because it made me feel something.

Unlike those on Twitter (referenced in the main article), I found the Wiz Khalifa track a breath of fresh air from the dub-step action epics and juxtaposed warm-and-fuzzy shooter reels. I also enjoyed watching a simple (mostly) side-shot mano-a-mano CG(?) fight in lieu of an over the top action sequence packed with cameo after cameo.

However, where the teaser is refreshing under the lens of style, it lacks the substance necessary to elicit excitement for this game. Grumpy Kuchera wins again.

Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris programmer, writing for the The Guardian:

Next I put together the procedures for manipulating the pieces: pick a tile, flip it, rotate it. But the playfield filled up in 20 seconds flat. Also, once you’d filled a line, it was kind of dead, so why keep it on the screen? So I made each full line disappear, which was key. I was a pretty good programmer and it took me about three weeks to get something controllable on screen. I pretended I was debugging my program, but in truth I just couldn’t stop playing it. When other people tried it, they couldn’t, either. It was so abstract – that was its great quality. It appealed to everybody.

Robert Kingett, legally-blind video game reviewer with cerebral palsy via IGN:

In multiplayer games I will always be at a slight disadvantage because I can’t look at multiple parts of the screen at once because of my tunnel vision. It’s like looking through a toilet paper roll all the time. My cerebral palsy hinders me as well but not in games like MAGIC, or similar because that’s strategy. I do have a stutter and people who want to be gamers are quick to point out I sound “retarded” or “like I am disabled.” It saddens me to see that there are not many true gamers anymore who just enjoy gaming no matter how unskilled someone is. I actually know some mentally disabled people who play better than most, and when I say play, I mean their spirit.

I’ve experienced a lot of that, and I just don’t understand why people say some of the things that they say. It’s not going to create an elite gaming world full of epic gamers who know every Easter egg known to man. Gamers will game, no matter who says what. I’m a gamer and I will game on. I enjoy the art and everything else video games have to offer and that means enjoying it with all kinds of people. There are even cases of people being flat out derogatory to other races on video games. Again, I don’t understand why. I don’t want people like that ruining it for us gamers.

Kingett on what developers can do to make their games more accessible:

There are three words I’d say that makes a video game completely accessible. Customization, choices, and alternatives. Have a game very customizable in all assets and you will have an accessible game. Have caption customizations where deaf players can have captions in a font that they want to have. Make your HUD’s customizable so visually impaired players like me can change the map size, the radar size, the crosshair size and shape, have assist, control mapping options, different control styles - just make your game very customizable unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

A must read.