Michael Heron's Blog
My name is Michael Heron, and I'm a lecturer at Robert Gordon University. This page serves as a container for all the various things with which I'm involved. My research interests are accessibility, games, and especially accessibility in games. You can find links to my published academic work here.
I am also the owner, admin and lead developer of Epitaph: a text-based MMO set in the grim darkness of the zombie apocalypse.
I am also the editor for Meeple Like Us, a board game blog with a strong focus on the accessibility of tabletop games.
Member Blogs
Here's a discussion about the awkward appropriation that comes with being a (relatively) abled accessibility advocate reviewing games for their accessibility.
The power of word of mouth in supporting a project is often seen as a polite runner-up to financial support. In this blog I open up some of our stats to show how powerful word of mouth is in a world where Facebook charges for access to your own fans.
If you were ever interested in the behind the scene numbers of a small gaming blog's Patreon, then I'm going to open up my wallet and show you everything that's in it.
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. This is on the accessibility of house rule
This post discusses jargon in game rhetoric - how it creates inaccessibility even as it underlines membership in a community. Some thoughts are presented on the use of mindful jargon in our discourses with other people.
What are the limits of social advocacy in game reviews? What should we be doing, what shouldn't we be doing, and what do we hope to gain by including our agendas in our game coverage.
Michael Heron's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/17/2018 - 06:42]
I think it 's uncomfortable ...
I think it 's uncomfortable territory - if you 're already flirting with the idea that Patreon is a kind of crowdsourced welfare something I hear a fair bit it only intensifies the unease to open up and talk about it. Kickstarters are usually an easier sell - 'give me ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 07/29/2016 - 10:38]
Hi there - sorry, missed ...
Hi there - sorry, missed this at the time r n r nIt 's definitely true there is nothing specific about hunting around for words/environment hooks that is a problem, but in my experience this was almost always unintended. I don 't recall many people, during my time coding collaboratively ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/10/2016 - 12:12]
Cool - who were you ...
Cool - who were you on DW MUD I was Drakkos there was a Lord, IIRC correctly, at the height of the Quest List Wars . r n r nThere certainly was an ingrained opposition to the idea of cheating in all its forms, but I don 't think it ...
