If you are interested in hobbyist development and how tools companies are adapting to the democratization of gaming, or if you are curious about the emergence of programming-free utilities by which you can experiment with popular genres, here is a sincere and ideally-informative article for you.

If the idea of hobbyist dev and fringe culture is interesting to you, you might also like one of my recent Creators Project columns on its rise.

Also, I am excited to announce I’m returning to Kotaku as a monthly columnist, and this bit of weird satire is my dubiously-considered re-debut; if you are sincerely interested in social gaming business, entrepreneurship, “web 2.0″ or ideas about gamification and social currency, hopefully it makes you feel terrible. Kidding! Kind of. Anyway, please enjoy HOW TO LAUNCH YOUR GAME DEVELOPMENT CAREER IN 2013.

I’ve still got the privilege of being one of Edge’s monthly columnists, too, and my stuff seems to go online about a month or so or thereabouts after subscribers get it in print. My latest column is about the rise of ‘cult of personality’ in development, and in it I explain why I find the work of complicated, difficult personalities so interesting — I even prefer it over games you’d call mass-appealing or ‘highly-polished’. Appropriately, I learned it was online when I saw Anna snarking it on Twitter.

There is finally an iPad in my life, so I’m spending a lot of time playing Pandemic Plague Inc. and naming plagues after my pets and also my enemies (ha ha, you caused projectile vomiting worldwide, you ass) . Talk soon.