Alex Carter
Tennis Gaming Editor & Arcade Game Researcher
8 years covering sports and browser gaming · Get in touch
Alex Carter is the editorial identity of this site, not a tennis professional. Alex writes about tennis video games — their mechanics, history and design. Nothing published here is coaching advice, and no claim is made to playing credentials, coaching qualifications or any affiliation with a tennis organisation. Where an article touches on the real sport, it is for context only. The portrait on this page is an illustration, clearly marked as such, rather than a photograph presented as something it is not.
Biography
Alex Carter is the editor of Tennis Arcade Games and has spent eight years writing about sports and browser gaming. That work has covered arcade sports titles across platforms, the design of casual and one-button games, and the long, awkward transition of browser gaming from plugin runtimes to native web standards.
The interest that led to this site is narrower than "games" and narrower even than "sports games". It is the question of why some very small games hold attention and others do not — why a two-minute browser game with one button can be more compelling than a far more elaborate one, and what specifically a designer did to make that happen.
Arcade tennis turned out to be the ideal subject for that question. The games are small enough to understand completely, the genre is old enough to have a real design lineage, and almost nobody writes about it with any precision. Building the games as well as writing about them means the numbers in every article — window widths, escalation rates, opponent reaction delays — are read off actual source code rather than guessed at.
Editorial approach
Four principles govern what gets published here.
Specificity over generality. "Improve your timing" is not advice. "Your errors have a direction, most players are consistently late, here is how to find out which you are" is advice, because it tells you what to do differently. Wherever a number exists, the article gives the number.
Show the working. Where a claim comes from our own game code, the article says so. Where it is a general observation about how the genre tends to behave, the article says that instead. Readers can then weigh the two differently, which they should.
State the uncertainty. Several topics that touch this subject have genuinely unsettled evidence: whether reaction training transfers between tasks, how large browser gaming actually is, and a good deal of early games history. The temptation is to pick the confident-sounding version. We flag the doubt instead, even when it makes an article less quotable.
Publish less. Eight articles are live and sixty-two are outlined and scheduled openly rather than rushed out as stubs. A thin page helps nobody, and a site full of them is worse than a small site that is worth reading.
On corrections
Corrections are welcome and are treated as useful rather than as an embarrassment. If something here is wrong, the fastest way to fix it is to say so through the contact page or directly by email.
The fact-checking policy sets out what happens next: how quickly a report is acknowledged, how a change is recorded on the page, and the difference between a silent typo fix and a correction that gets a visible note. Substantive corrections are labelled on the article rather than quietly edited away.
Areas of expertise
- Tennis video games and sports arcade titles
- Browser and HTML5 game mechanics
- Arcade game design and difficulty tuning
- Casual and one-button game accessibility
- The history of electronic tennis games
Published articles
Every article on this site is written by Alex. There are currently 8 published, with the pipeline listed openly on the article index.
- History of Tennis Video Games: From Oscilloscope to Browser
- One-Button Tennis Games Explained: Design Under Total Constraint
- Tennis Arcade Challenges Explained: Why Single-Skill Modes Work
- How to Improve Your Tennis Game Timing: A Practical Method
- How Tennis Arcade Scoring Works: Points, Chains and Multipliers
- Tennis Game Controls Explained: Every Input Scheme in the Genre
- How to Play Tennis Arcade Games: The Loop Every Game Shares
- What Are Tennis Arcade Games? A Complete Guide to the Genre
Contact and profiles
Corrections, questions and game submissions all go through the contact page, or directly to editorial@tennisarcade.xyz. Corrections are taken seriously and are handled under our fact-checking policy.
Social profiles for this site have not been set up. When they are, they will be listed here and in the footer. We would rather show nothing than link to accounts that do not exist.