Making History
We are connected, each day to the last, by the path of our history. Your memories are the map, and every so often you compare the landmarks of your life against what you see on that map and, invariably, if…
Category Diagnosticism
Out of Control
I’ve been thinking about bad controls in games. What does it mean when people say that a game has bad controls? Usually, more often than not, they mean that it’s difficult to control. The more games I play, though, the…
Fetch
Usually it’s a tennis ball: Sometimes (not often), still recognizable as such. She digs it out from among the tall weeds and brings it to me, and I throw it, and she runs out and grabs it and brings it…
First Impressions
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how games and other works ask us to engage with them. Each work of art exists within a greater context, and how we parse the messages those works engender is affected…
Empty Calories
The tricky thing about procrastination is how satisfying it is. Say what you will, when your problem is that you’re stressing over a deadline, just doing nothing and letting the deadline slip is a definite solution to that problem, and…
Spatial Awareness
Playing Dark Souls has gotten me thinking about the different ways that games structure their world. I really want to describe, in a concrete way, what makes exploring the world of Dark Souls feel like such a different experience from…
Rules vs Mechanics
The discipline of game design is only recently, spurred by the financial and popular success of modern video games, beginning to be explored in a formal way. Because of this newness, there tends to still be a lot of ambiguity…
Discomfort Zone
Art in general and games in particular have an uncomfortable relationship with discomfort. People don’t like being made uncomfortable– at least, not when it’s called by that name. Really, though, discomfort tends to come hand-in-hand with novelty. Anything that’s new…
Recommended Viewing for Game Designers
Inception The plot of Inception revolves around a group of specialists who invade people’s dreams to steal ideas– or, in this case, to plant an idea. This is a story entirely about crafting a world for an audience in such…
Untitled
As I continue developing my personal game project, a little worry keeps on nibbling at the back of my mind– and, at this point, it’s probably had enough time to chew away a substantial portion of my brain stem, which…