Keith Stuart looks back at the 30 year old Commodore Amiga:

Commodore Amiga at 30 – the computer that made the UK games industry

It’s 30 years since Commodore launched its powerful Amiga 1000 computer, ushering in the era of Worms, Lemmings and myriad other Britsoft classics

In 1985 my family made a terrible mistake – a mistake that would have far-reaching consequences; a mistake that would blight my life for several painful years. I still look back at it with a sense of sadness and, yes, if I’m honest, fury. What happened was this – and if you’re a gamer of a certain age, you may want to sit down: my family bought an Atari ST instead of a Commodore Amiga.

With its powerful 16bit processor and vast 256k of memory (expandable to 512k and beyond), the original Amiga 1000 was the epoch-shattering home computer that effectively invented the concept of the all-round multimedia machine. The Atari ST, meanwhile, was pretty good for midi music.

Today, the Amiga is 30 years old and the internet is full of veteran computer users nostalgically wallowing in its seminal importance. In fact, many of those people probably experienced the internet for the first time on an Amiga, via its original 1680 Modem (it had a 1200 baud rate, speed fans).

But at the time, I didn’t care about its serious computing prowess or the fact that its multitasking operating system was incredibly advanced. I cared about games. And the Amiga was amazing for games – especially for British developers.

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Damien Walter (The Guardian) asks the question:
"Why don’t RPG manuals count as books?"

The joy of reading role-playing games

I’m a lifelong fan of role-playing games, but I rarely play them. Dungeons & Dragons. Call of Cthulhu. Vampire: The Masquerade. Cyberpunk 2013. Traveller. I’ve been enchanted by the words and illustrations, and drawn into the imaginary worlds of as many RPGs as novels. So I’m always surprised, and a little dismayed, when RPGs are left out of the popular discussion about books and reading.

Though the term didn’t exist back when I was a teenager, squatting on comic-book floors to thumb through expensive hardback editions, RPGs are an example of the kind of literature described by Espen J Aarseth as “ergodic”. These are books, like digital literature, computer-generated poetry and MUDs, where a “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text”. And they are more common than you might think, especially in geek culture. Game books that allow you to “choose your own adventure” are ergodic, as are fantasy novels with extensive maps and world-building notes. But the RPG handbook pushes ergodic reading to its limit.

By putting aside simple narrative storytelling and replacing it with detailed description, the RPG offers the total immersion in an imaginary world so valued by geek readers. The elaboration of leading characters, political factions and major historical events is sometimes a very dry exercise in world building, but done with enough skill it can spark a deeply satisfying response. [...]

Jonathan Allford (the Guardian) noticed that many gamers don't finish their games anymore - some snippets:

Just 6.4% of players who have bought role-playing adventure Pillars of Eternity have actually completed it, according to the PC gaming service, Steam. This critically acclaimed throwback to genre classics like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale returns us to a period in which playing games was a much more demanding experience. I finished Pillars of Eternity a few weeks ago and the experience has left me crushed.
(...)

Games spell things out for us now. Even in a title as detailed and character driven as Dragon Age: Inquisition I’ll see a villain doing villainous things as they spout villainous words because they’re a villain and that’s what villains do. I don’t have to use my imagination to see the subtext behind their actions, to gauge why what they’re doing matters to them.
(...)

If you want enjoyment out of the genre classics, you have to commit to the world that the game presents to you; it’s a leap of faith. And given the difficulty of grasping Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mechanics in a game like Baldur’s Gate, for example, you’re not always guaranteed to land in a wagon of hay.
(...)

Maybe knowing and seeing everything are less important these days; maybe we are different now. But I don’t regret chasing Pillars of Eternity to its end – even if it did take forever.