My Octopus

Is Smarter Than You

[griddleoctopus]

How Frédérick Raynal made and lost his horror masterpiece - the first 3D PC game.

The Making of... Alone In The Dark

[griddleoctopus]

PUBG: Black Budget

I’m an additional writer on this project.

PUBG: Black Budget

[griddleoctopus]

Total War: Warhammer 40,000

I’m an additional writer on this project.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000

[griddleoctopus]

My article for Worldbuilding Magazine on using philosophy to create believable settings.

Babysteps in Belief-Building

[griddleoctopus]

Interview: Matt Woodley of Domark, on Championship Manager and Football Manager.

To The Tune Of: Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds – Three Lions – Original Version For the “Making Ofs” I do for PC Gamer, I always interview too many people. After legal reasons preventd Miles Jacobsen being as forthcoming as I’d hoped, he recommended I talk to Matt Woodley, who has always worked with the series. And I did. The original box.The original box. I’m trying to do a Making of on…

Interview: Matt Woodley of Domark, on Championship Manager and Football Manager.

[griddleoctopus]

It's up to you if you have both a sample folder and a portfolio, as they fulfil the same function - providing evidence for the arguments you made in your covering letter. I have both, with slightly difference functions.

Game Writer Applications:Samples / Portfolio

[griddleoctopus]

Judas book start

Enough. Everyone seems to think I will write one day, why I don’t know. Damn the premonitory bullying. I will start now. Here’s my portent. Here’s my book. So Judas is crying. He cries a lot at the moment. Perhaps he always was a weeper, a grabber of momma’s shawl, a chaser of comforting skirts. In the grim cities of the old middle east, where men are bound by the newfound strictures that seek…

[griddleoctopus]

Ideal/Perfect

My ideal of the perfect person then. And my ideal of what I can achieve. I’m sure Aristotle says something about this in the Nichomachean Ethics, something about there being two best lives that should be lived, that which is the true best life, only livable by gods, and the best life for a man. Or that could have been my interpretation of Plato. Or my reading of someone else’s thoughts on…

[enchantedbook]

'A Week of Kindness' by Max Ernst, 1934.

[griddleoctopus]

From Une Semaine de Bonte. Great, weird, collage book.

[griddleoctopus]

My father drives a car.

My father drives a car. It fits in.

In England, my father drives a car. It is black and shiny and slick and unscratched. Throughout it, gadgets warm seats, gauge performance, mollify and coddle. Tech-fairies transmit signals through the air, so that his other devices, his extended digital self, integrates with it thoroughly. It purrs as it drives down the road. It fits in. In Corfu, my father drives a car. It is black, but the…

View On WordPress

[griddleoctopus]

Creating Brand You

I wrote this article many, many years ago, for PC Plus, the magazine I started on way back in 2002. You might not realise it yet, but you’re a brand. All this time you’ve been walking and talking and posting on the internet, thinking you were a person, when you’ve been a brand all along. Who’d have thought it? All of your activities have been contributing to the brand, building a profile for it…

View On WordPress

[griddleoctopus]

Legacy, Lebowski

Creatively, we write our names in the sand. I take joy in this process - in the creation itself - but I do not expect the things I make to last my lifetime. Work is evanescent, fame fleeting. Immortality only exists in fairytales.

Of the 40+ print magazines I worked on, less than 5% are still in print. Of the games I’ve worked on as a writer, at least half didn’t make it out of the starting gate. (One, called Legacy, came out this year and is almost impossible to access. I don’t know anyone who’s played it.) Of the games I worked on in marketing, most are unplayable on modern hardware – MMOs, games for older generation…

View On WordPress

[griddleoctopus]

Total War: WARHAMMER III – Thrones of Decay

View On WordPress

[griddleoctopus]

Total War: WARHAMMER III - Shadows of Change

View On WordPress

[guerrillatech]

[griddleoctopus]

What I see

Subjectivism is mandatory. When I look, I don’t see the same as you – I can’t. I’m sure my brain processes the inputs in different ways, sparks different neuronal connections. But I’m also aware of the filters in the way of what I see. My vision occupies a wide space. I’d say it probably covers a shape a bit like a cucumber on its side. I suspect that’s wider than most people’s because my eyes…

View On WordPress

[griddleoctopus]

Dick's Golden Man & LLMs

So, it’s a well-known fact that Philip K Dick predicted everything, as a by-product of his desperate need to write for money. His particular genius wasn’t in merely predicting future science or writing thrilling adventures though. He also predicted the social consequences of future changes, as well as foreseeing the different kinds of minds that might arise. And he predicted something like the…

View On WordPress