Rolled Flat
There’s a very special kind of annoyance when it becomes obvious that a work of art that you really like has actually impacted its medium for the worse. For instance, while I quite like the film Inception, for years afterwards…
Category Essays
Hellbound
A while ago I had the opportunity to see the stage show Hadestown, a jazzy operatic retelling of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. We had to drive a while to get there and I wasn’t sure how much down-time…
Growing Green
I’ve noticed in myself that recently whenever I see gameplay footage of a new game I tend to have a kneejerk negative reaction. In part this is simply because I’ve gotten sick of a lot of game design and writing…
Sword and Shield
The power of empathy is an idea that is simultaneously talked about way too much while hardly being understood at all. There’s two things that we get wrong when we speak of using empathy to resolve conflict. We talk about…
Animalistic
Something that frequently bothers me is the way animals are treated in games. There are a few dimensions to this: Often, the only animals represented in a game are those which pose a direct threat, aggressive predators which attack at…
Cross-Pollination
I admire innovative game design. It’s always fascinating to see new ideas for expressing things through gameplay, new ideas for things to be expressed through gameplay, new ideas for what sorts of play could even be considered a game. At…
Pause
You may have noticed I’ve fallen progressively further behind on posting updates here. I mentioned some time back that this was because some of the essays were getting too big and detailed – that is still true, I have a…
Magic/Routine
I don’t like spell-casting much in games. If I get the option between playing as a character who uses physical weapons and one who uses magic I will almost always choose the former – which is a bit odd when…
The Flow Between
In animation “tweening” refers to creating the frames that smooth out the action and make it read as a single motion. Traditionally, the frames which define a motion – the “key” frames – would be drawn be the lead animator,…
Made to Order
Solving a problem is one of the most satisfying sensations in the world. Often this satisfaction is preceded by hours, days, months, or years of tedium and frustration as we struggle to understand the problem, collect the tools and skills…