Dear Future Gamer,

Chris Causer states in the feedback section of FG26: "(technical phrase) - whatever that means. Don't fool yourselves, I'm sure you know what it means, you're a computer magazine. I would like to know what NURBS are, for example, so stop being so embarrassed about knowing stuff about computers".

You don't have to know much about art in order to tell people what you like, so that statement is not particularly accurate. But instead of writing a mini-article, surely it would make more sense to just provide a suitable hyperlink to a related article provided by (say) Edge?

You could take this principle further, providing links to other related mags - as well as third-party websites - who may be willing to pay for the privilege - whenever such pointers are needed.

It saves you work, and it saves re-inventing the wheel when you don't need to. As long as you use a small icon pointing out that 'this link requires you to go online' (see Microsoft's many websites for examples of this), then readers won't need to worry about unwanted dial-ups. And it handily converts FG into a sort of offline 'portal' site.

Just a thought...

Sean Timarco Baggaley

FG: And it's something we've thought long and hard about. The beauty of Future Gamer, we think, is that you don't have to be online to read it. The last thing I want to do is send people online who don't want to. We’re also a very populist magazine – we're not a technical manual and believe that most of our readers are not terribly concerned with a load of technical data. We’re about games for gamers. There are plenty of other quality publications that go into great depths about the more technical aspects of videogaming – Edge being a fine example. But generally it’s not a route we want to go down. We will explain technical matters where appropriate but I think we’ve got the balance about right in Future Gamer. Almost finally, I don’t want FG to become a mere portal site! I want people to enjoy reading the magazine as a magazine in its own right. Finally, NURBS means Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines. Which still means very little to me.