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
Review scores have become very unfashionable. They've been replaced with badges, recommendation lists, and a whole pile of categorizations. Largely though the problem here isn't with review scores. It's in how people use them.
I intend for 2019 to be a year of depth - a chance to play all those games I have bought and never even looked at. No new hobbies. No new unnecessary purchases. Just me and my Steam library in mortal combat.
Are there common accessibility issues across board games despite the fact that every board game is different? The answer initially seems like it should be no, but actually there is a common problem. Board games have manuals, and manuals are awful.
Whether or not board game reviewers should silo themselves away from other perspectives or not, it's a concept that can be difficult to fully realise when you review only for a hobby.
Board gaming is sometimes considered to be a luxury hobby. Given that the costs need not necessarily be excessively high, what does that even mean? We discuss in this post.
Reviews often spend too much time describing and not a lot of time analysing. This is a discussion of how the use of Bloom's Taxonomy can help address this by systemizing the act of reviewing.
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 ...
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[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 ...
