TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY
Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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The First-Person Observer
I don’t often write a whole post just to link a site – since Twitter, anyway – but Chris Livingston’s new venture deserves special treatment. The First-Person Observer is an online paper covering the issues that matter to today’s gruff, laconic videogame protagonists. It’s:
Relevant!Health Pack Reform Divides Nation
Classic!
Desperate, Marooned Astronaut Tries To Use Every Item With Every Other Item
Scientific!
Report: One in Four Children Born With Ability To Slow Down Time
Touching!
Hostages Rescued by Courageous Racist
And it’s some of the funniest games writing I’ve read all year. It’s pretty easy to come up with the idea of an Onion for gaming, but it’s harder than you’d think to flesh it out, keep it varied, and avoid driving the joke into the ground. Hardcasual exists, but it’s pretty hit-and-miss and focuses more on gaming news rather than news from within games.
The stories above are just my favourites: impressively there’s masses more to read already. I don’t know how regularly he plans on updating it, but I don’t think it needs to be frequent to work. It just needs to stay this good.