"I only got to hang out with Rachael once: in San Francisco, for a week, during the Game Developers Conference...

Here’s how we did it: She shared my eyes and ears, and she wrote her impressions through my laptop and my BlackBerry. When we touched down at SFO, she wrote the first tweet, and she eavesdropped on the game designers that I sat with riding into town on the BART. We were working press—except I was the one sweating the deadlines, and looking for good ideas, while she was just loving it..." Chris Dahlen on writing pixelvixen707

"The walkthrough posted by Lee Beng Hai belongs in a “best games writing” list somewhere, not so much for the prose, but for the depth of his coverage and the gratitude I feel for it, like he’s the first guy in my tribe to wander into the jungle and come back with all his limbs." Chris Dahlen on why nobody's writing about Demon's Souls, but everybody's playing it. (Also: "It’s not “flow”, because flow implies progress; it’s more like tantric sex with a slide rule" is a brilliant analogy).

"But what if you make personalisation easier? Consider a game that brings your real world into your game world, all on its own. It could to grab data from the internet about the real world and the gamers that live in it, and weave it into the game experience, for an effect that is both surprising and personally meaningful. You would see yourself in a game without having to put yourself there. It’s not user-generated content: it’s user-generated, machine-mediated content – UGMMC, or as I like to say it, “Ugh-Meck.”" I am super-happy at how well Chris's writing for Edge Online is turning out.

"And if you the beat the game? An animation plays, showing Waters and Gilmour sitting at a pub, chatting like old mates. And as the screen fades to black, they share a little fist bump." Chris' column really is a lovely addition to Edge Online. This is a good one.

"The Beatles: Rock Band is the total opposite [of Rock Band 2]. The "characters" are untouchable, and the tracks don't even toss you a freestyle section. Your only choices are to get the song right, or not. Sure, it's a cliché that most videogames make you save the world, but at least in those games, you know you're needed. I've never felt less important in a game than this one." Chris Dahlen makes an excellent point in the midst of his excellent (and otherwise uniformly positive) review of The Beatles: Rock Band for Pitchfork.

"So why don’t we aim for a new tier - something that takes a chunk out of the 90, to lead it closer to the 9 and the 1? Why not give users a chance to enter something personal and creative, but let the system mediate, moderate and filter it into something useful?" Yes. The 90-9-1 pyramid is actually a very unhelpful metaphor, IMHO, and trying to explore and encourage creativity along a sliding scale rather than an absolute is important.