Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here - to be returned to, I think.

"In principle, the pressure ought to be off, since you've got a infinitive lives and a stock of smart-bombs. In practice, the game quickly becomes so pulsingly busy that I not infrequently become blind to the position of my own ship. I'm still playing - still winning - but have no visual awareness of the bright white claw I'm actually steering. The bit of my brain that handles moving knows where it is, but the bit of my brain that does the thinking has no idea, and they very rapidly start screaming at each other." Margaret's new column for Gamasutra goes live (hurrah). Talking about this was one reason I got sucked back into Deadline very deeply a few weeks ago. Deep enough to edge beyond randomness, towards a semblence of mastery, and at least understand the system. At least enough to understand quite how fine it is.

"...let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great - Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.

Simon Parkin interviews Martin Hollis. As with much of what Martin says, it is gentle, readable, and dotted with nuggets of purest gold. And the word "teleportage". Martin's a lovely, lovely chap, and he really, really knows his stuff; reading this should convince you of that.

Jolly good interview with Tim Sweeney, with lots on ZZT (hurrah!), and, I think most interestingly lots of on building games around editors and tools - from ZZT through Unreal to the present day. I like his acknowledgments of his shortcomings as a progammer - but perhaps also his shrewdness as a manager.

"Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.

...and then a massive anonymous slagging-match and name-calling session begins in the comments. Some reasonable commentary in amongst a lot of mud-slinging about the state of EALA...

"Hired as visual artist in the summer of 2006, my challenge was not only to clearly present Braid's mechanics and behaviors, but to help tell a story that was anything but literal: part anecdote, part artifice, part philosophy. This article explains the process of developing visuals for a nearly-complete game with a highly idiosyncratic identity, the challenges encountered, and some of the nuts-and-bolts of our methods and tools." David Hellman on his work on the art of Braid.