"By enabling the brain to manipulate with virtual systems, to engage with simulation, it creates systems than span the mental and the virtual, the biological and the electrical. Also, even more significantly to my point, our imagination is not a description as a book is a textual description, or a film is a visual description. It is, instead, a model." This is good, and the links are great, too.

"Perhaps we should be turning up at the cinema expecting more stories about resilience, or reports from the future where the problems are what to do with limitless energy, or Japanese consciousness multipliers, rather than dustbowls and gasmask hipsters. Authors: is that nihilism really what you want to leave behind? Your silhouette a stoop, rather than a hurrah?" Jim, quite rightly, likes his "shiny retro shit".

"So to come full circle with the sense of dissatisfaction with open world games: I think the way we experience them, by comparison with linear games, says something about how our gaming imagination functions. We seem to understand that when linear games point us in a certain direction, that’s the way to go. When an open world game appears, its very structure suggests something about how we should behave, or want to behave, and predisposes us to judge on the basis of how it entices us to go somewhere that the game itself hasn’t suggested, and on how it then deals with that action." Jim on open-world gaming.

"I was, instead, going to see what it would take to drive around the world in a single sitting. It would have to be a single sitting because, without unlocking the game, I could not easily return to where I had driven to, or save my location. I was going to drive without the safety-net of a saved game, or even a checkpoint." Jim takes a tour of a properly big open-world; Fuel's not a game I'm very interested in for its mechanics, but the world always seemed interesting, and it's nice to have that confirmed.

On Shadow of the Colossus: "When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is _all_ you can do. Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar." Rossignol hits up BLDGBLOG, and (as if you couldn't have guessed), it's good.

"That is not to say that videogames need to be more sensationalist, more vulgar, or more crass, but that they need not fear being more transgressive, or more expressive, or more visceral. They need not to shy away from their darker depictions of our fantasies, or become embarrassed when people point out how they dwell on violence and excitement. This, the safe excursion to the gladiatorial arena, is what games do best." Rossignol on Ballard, and jolly good too.

War reporting from a virtual world; Jim Rossignol documents the first skirmishes in the Offworld/RPS/Escapist conflict. Looking forward to more of this.

"Imagine it: instead of text adventures and MUDs being designed to entertain MIT students and 23-year old computer engineers, they fall into the hands of bored housewives and teenage girls... This time there are romantic text adventures, digital doll's houses, dating games. Card deck games where you collect friends, or Versace. The trend continues and the licences that get picked up are not action movies, but those of popular soap operas: Not just hot teenage stuff like 90210, but Guiding Light, Days Of Our Lives, and One Life To Live. This is a games industry completely different to our own, and yet somehow... plausible." Jim Rossignol on the soap-as-game.