Gamasutra Expert Blogs: From Reality Shows To Latin America

[In highlights from Gamasutra's Expert Blogs, industry notables write about diverse topics, including one country's attempt to foster indie dev culture through a reality show, the Latin American games industry, and more.] In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra. Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share. We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the latest official posting guidelines. Here are the top blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Expert Blogs Building A Culture Of Innovation Through A Reality Show? (Howard Tsao) Best intentions can sometimes go really wrong. Instead of the more aspirational routes that some governments take to foster indie dev culture, one government decides to try a reality show X Factor-style. What You Might Not Know About The Latin American Games Industry (Robert Levitan) Pando Networks' chief executive Robert Levitan digs into the challenges of getting games to Latin America, like the difficulties for publishers just trying to get their games into players' hands. 2D Game Art For Programmers - Part 1 (Chris Hildenbrand) This is the first in a set of tutorials from Chris Hildenbrand covering free graphic tools like Inkscape and Gimp for creating 2D game art. The idea is to construct the art with set elements like circles and square rather than hand-drawing the elements. Opinion: On Gabe Newell’s Hypocrisy Re: 'Closed Platforms' (Richard Hill-Whittall) Icon Games' head of development Richard Hil-Whittall says he was "more than a little bemused" to read about Gabe Newell’s recent attack on 'closed platforms' from Apple, Sony, etc.