GAMES MEDIA AWARDS: Recommended Reading – The piece that won Games Writer of the Year

Want to read Keza MacDonald’s award winning article on EVE Online?

Then click here.

The IGN-published article scored MacDonald the first ever Games Writer of the Year prize at the Games Media Awards last night.

The piece was judged blind by Guardian columnist and award-winning author Tim Lott, and selected from a range of submissions from across the UK games media.

The winning piece was Internet Spaceships are Serious Business by IGN’s Keza Macdonald – an exploration of the EVE Online success story.

"Iceland looks like an alien planet, a foreign world of bubbling chemical pools and volcanic smells bathed in strange colours by an unenthusiastic sun," the piece begins, likening EVE developer CCP’s homeland to one of the planets in its vast online universe.

In a lengthy trip to the country and meeting fans at one of the developer’s epic fan festivals, MacDonald explored the passions and emotions around playing EVE Online.

Says MacDonald: "Eve is not like any other videogame in the world, not even remotely. What CCP has done over the past nine years, and what it’s continuing to do now with things like Dust 514, the PlayStation 3’s first massively multiplayer online FPS, is quietly but confidently changing the entire conception of what a videogame can be, and how far it can extend into real life."

But we won’t spoil any more. Click through here to read the award-winning piece.