Adaptive Difficulty
Adaptive difficulty is a game design concept that held a great deal of traction for a little while but has seemingly fallen out of favor recently. “The player should be challenged at all times,” is the ideal, “but never actually…
Category Diagnosticism
Folding Space
Recently, games-wise, I’ve been taking a bit of a break from my usual artsy and the pretentious indie fare to play a bit of Poker. Poker Night at the Inventory that is– what, did you think I had the money…
The Shape of Things
Isn’t it strange the effect that shapes can have on us? Where do they depart from abstract form and become meaningful and evocative? A cylinder, with a bit of reshaping, begins to look like a thigh… and, once we begin…
Connections
“If this is so, then what else is so?” My brother introduced me to this particular precept of improv acting a few weeks ago. The basic idea is, something comes up about a character or a situation or circumstance: Following…
No Accountability
Something I always liked about playing Final Fantasy games in particular and JRPGs in general is the way random deities tended to turn up as various monsters in the world. These creatures usually had approximately fuck-all to do with their…
Gems
Something that struck me powerfully the first time I played Super Hexagon, and which has always hovered at the back of my mind as I play it, is how easily it could have been a different game. Most games are…
Solipsism
He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so…
The Contract
Rules are most of what defines a game, but there tends to be a method, a principle, by which a game’s rules are applied, and these principles, the meta-rules that dictate the design of the game to the designers, are…
The Forest for the Trees
I’ve been struggling a bit to find a topic I want to write about this week, and upon extensive reflection I thought it might be a good idea to write about how I’ve been struggling a bit to find a…
Accomplices
Games are a strange and delicate string of analogies. A button with an X on it is a jump, a button with a Y on it is a punch to a stranger’s face, and within the context of the game…