One of the things you might not know about Mass Effect is how the BioWare developers are able to let players have an impact on an epic story.

This isn’t a matter of creating a shuffle text. Because decisions the players make affect the actual story that they are told, it’s more like creating a shuffle text in which some of the pieces may or may not show up at all, let alone in a different sequence.

In an article for the Globe & Mail I look at the Narrative Dialogue System and the Plot Manager, two technical tools used by BioWare to wrangle the massive story that is Mass Effect.

You can read it in full over here.

Despite attempts by some elements of the music industry to keep a stranglehold on content by leveraging technology, digital rights management of music will come to and end this year.

Consumers will benefit, but I believe artists and music creators will, too.

That’s the topic of this week’s “Techno Logic” column in the Georgia Straight.

Read “Big Music is fighting a losing battle for rights” over here.

This week’s FFWD Weekly includes my latest “Joystuck” column. In this issue is my look at the video game, Turok, including a review and a conversation with Joel Manners, director of the game.

If last year proved anything its that the FPS genre in the video-game world is not dead. Indeed, we learned that the standard FPS tricks work just fine when they are wrapped in a fun, interesting story.

In this week’s “Trigger Happy column in the Georgia Straight I look at the next-generation of FPS games to refresh the genre.

Included in the column are Halo 3, Bioshock, Jericho, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, BlackSite: Area 51, and Crysis.

My latest “Techno Logic” column in the Georgia Straight is a look at Radiohead’s digital distribution experiment with their latest album, In Rainbows.

The truth is, offering the album as a “pay what you want” download was nothing more than a big publicity stunt, as you can now purchase the CD at any retailer – including Starbucks.

There’s some weirdness going on with some of the Straight URLs, so for the time being you’ll have to access the full story through the Straight’s homepage.

Read the full story.