When I took my first hiatus after four years of running Meeple Like Us, there were a few reasons behind it. One was the workload I had inflicted upon myself. I was covering a game a week, which meant a review and a teardown… but mainly, what it meant was…
Category: Editorial
Four Years and A Hiatus
This is the last non-patron post you’ll see on the site for a while, because as I indicated in our last editorial – I’m burnt the hell out on the site and I need to take some extended time to reconnect with the hobby rather than the hustle. But today…
Burnout, The Hobby, and the Hustle
I often struggle with the work I do for this site. Not… doing the work. But rather, the deeper motivation of why this work and why in this form. Before Meeple Like Us I was happy with academic publishing as being my main venue for getting thoughts, results and ideas…
Michael’s Depth Year 2019 – The Final Review
I’m sitting here in my new (very small) study in my apartment in Gothenburg. We’ve finally gotten almost everything unpacked. Furniture built up. I was pretty pleased to find they had an IKEA in Sweden, because we left a lot of things behind. IKEA is doing pretty well if it…
The Obligation
You’re reading this on Monday. On Friday Mrs Meeple and I will be on a plane, heading off to our new home in Gothenburg. It’s an exciting time to be sure – I’m looking forward to starting my new role at Chalmers University of Technology. I’ve been working towards this,…
Philosophical Questions on the Job of Reviewing
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on the topic of board game reviewing – the past few months of special features have either been largely populist (the top tens) or completely self-indulgent (such as discussing our move to Sweden, our time at Tabletop Scotland and so on). …
Where do we go from here? The future of Meeple Like Us
One of the things that happens with big life news is that you end up announcing it several times in several different contexts, each time requiring a certain amount of emotional investment. I feel like I have been announcing this solidly for about a month, because that’s basically what I’ve…
Frequently Imagined Questions – The Hobbyist Media Code of Conduct
Today we unveil the code of ethics and code of conduct for Meeple Like Us. There has been an awful lot of controversy about the topic of ethics on Twitter. A lot of arguments, heated emotions, and hurt feelings. A lot of ugly language has been thrown the way of…
Misleading with Play Counts
One of the topics that often bubbles up in the rotating ‘issue of the day’ conveyor belt of online discussion is that of reviewers and play counts – specifically, the question of whether reviewers should include these as part of their review content so as to let people decide how…
The Fun of Inaccessibility
There’s an awkward secret at the heart of the quest for game accessibility. Well, I guess it’s not a secret so much as an uncomfortable truth that we don’t talk about a lot. It’s pretty much unique to this field of accessibility work – there are no real parallels in…
Unwon and Unwinnable Causes
‘You talk of Scotland as a lost cause’, John Steinbeck once remarked to Jackie Kennedy. ‘That is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause’. As a supporter of Scottish independence, I take those words to heart. Here we are, shackled to a political state that is alarmingly self-destructive in its…
Stay In Your Lane
I think I’ve been consistently upfront with what I consider to be the biggest weakness of this site. It’s included as a disclaimer at the bottom of every teardown, and it’s persistently the thing that makes me feel most uneasy about Meeple Like Us on a day to day basis. …
The Accessibility of House Rules
Continuining our occasional series of posts about the AXSchat we conducted a few months ago I want to address another of the uniformly great questions asked during the Twitter chat that followed the interview.
Question five: Being able to select a difficulty level is a well-known accessibility benefit of digital games. …
Mindful Jargon
How might you describe your favourite board game? Mine is Chinatown, and if I was trying to explain what it was I might say something like:
‘Chinatown, right… it’s like… well, imagine… no, wait. Hang on. It’s like… a pure negotiation game with economic set collection and tile-based area control, except…
Social Advocacy
Let’s talk about a hypothetical game. A video game. A video game that doesn’t exist. Let’s say it’s called… Fled Bread Dimension. Fled Bread Dimension Two.
It’s not a real game.
And let’s say as part of the making of this hypothetical game, the hypothetical company behind its creation was revealed to…
I’m A Fraud – The Signed Confessions of Michael Heron
My name is Dr. Michael James Heron. And I’m a fraud. Herein lies my confession, in the dying days of the Year of our Lord, 2018. I spend a lot of time wrestling with that fact. I’m a fraud as far as this blog goes. I’m a fraud as…
Board Games and Social Isolation
A few months ago I took part in the AxsChat twitter hour, acting as the kind of ‘guest of honour’ for the topic of accessibility in boardgames. I got access to the questions in advance, which was great – the pace of the chat was so fast that it was…
In Defense of Board Game Review Scores
It’s hard to overstate the unfashionability of scores in game reviews. Outlets have been discarding them with merry abandon over the course of the past few years, often remarking that we live in a brave new world and they no longer serve any useful purpose. Many sites have never used…
The Universal Inaccessibility in Board Games
Recently I participated in the Axschat hour hosted by Debra Ruh, Neil Miliken and Atonio Santos. It was a lot of fun, albeit fun at speed. There were lots of discussions and plenty of interesting insights but they were all delivered with the intensity of a heart-stopping dose of heroin. At…
Reviewer Isolationism in the Hobbyist Media Landscape
If you’ve been following anything about video game journalism over the past few months you’ve undoubtedly encountered the farcical story of Filip Miucin. If not, here’s the brief recap: He was an IGN Editor who was found to have plagiarised pretty much the entirety of the structure, tone and critical…