Rowan Kaiser
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Rowan Kaiser is a freelance writer currently living the Bay Area, who also writes for The A.V. Club, and has been published at Salon, Gamasutra, Kotaku, and more. He still occasionally finds Ultima VI Moongate maps and mantra notes when he visits his parents' house. Follow him on Twitter @rowankaiser.
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Alpha Protocol is the new Deus Ex
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Alpha Protocol is the new Deus Ex. This may seem like a strong statement, given the original Deus Ex's regard as ...
When sports and role-playing games collide
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. I'm in a tense conflict. My party of five characters faces off against another. The battle is balanced on the ...
Publish those numbers! Why RPGs must be transparent about their mechanics
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The debate about what makes a "real" role-playing game flares up from time to time, with articles, comment ...
For the love of leveling
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. I gained one thousand seven hundred and twenty-one levels in the last year. Around the end of 2011, fellow game ...
2012: the year in RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. What a fun, odd year it's been for role-playing games. The genre in theory is looking as good as it has for over ...
Waiter, waiter! There's an RPG in my FPS!
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. It would be easy to say that many of today's first-person shooters are more RPG-like than ever before. Between ...
How Morrowind and KOTOR defined modern RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. In the early 2000s, two Western role-playing games grabbed the genre and shoved it into new and surprisingly ...
Struggling with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim one year later
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. This week Rowan explores the one-year anniversary of Skyrim, a game that – despite critical and commercial ...
The future of the Western role-playing game
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Here in November, we're nearing the end of the current console generation, as the Wii U kicks off the next gen by ...
Kickstarting (and not Greenlighting) traditional RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The rise of indie gaming has been fantastic for platformers, good for adventures and strategy games, great for ...
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Super Joystiq Podcast 051: Xbox One continued, impressions and interviews from Redmond
Posted on May 24th 2013 1:15PM