Skins and Costumes
Halloween keeps growing. More and more over time, this act of pretending, and of naked greed for candy, has defined who we are. It’s expanded, taken over the entire month. October is Halloween now. It’s a couple of days before…
Category Essays
Zeroes and Heroes
How is a number like a hero? How is an equation like a tragedy? First: The world as we perceive is not the world as it is. As we perceive the world we live in, through our sense of sight…
Numb
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how finding an audience is tied to finding a community, and generally being more open as a way to access more energy and creativity. Since then, I’ve been trying to be more…
Somewhat Sincerity
There’s a narrow line that games have to walk when it comes to story. On one side, we have a story that seems not to acknowledge that it’s kind of stupid that you spend most of the time in it…
Somewhere Out There
I am not an outgoing person. This is a trait that represents a significant obstacle as an artist, and I’m just now beginning to see how much of my time and effort has gone towards denying these problems rather than…
Monstrous
What are monsters? Are they scary or just strange? It’s a shifty word that keeps on shifting. Monsterness is in the eye of the beholder – although, with the beholder being, itself, a monster made of eyes, this may be…
Difficult Designs
Difficulty is a difficult subject. What makes a game harder or easier is intricately tangled in what makes it work as an experience: Just as you can’t take a difficult game and make it easy without losing something, you can’t…
Pigmote Isle
I’ve been taking the opportunity of finally getting kind of burned out on Dark Souls to go back through my massive Steam backlog and try out some of those games acquired over the last decade but never actually installed or…
Makers
Creation is so much harder than creativity. Creation is engineering, is sport, physically and mentally exhausting, the tiny motions, tapping of keys, scraping of pencils. Creation springs from creativity, is rooted in the imagination, but can only manifest through days…
Small Magic
Magic sucks. We’ve fucked it up. We’ve made it boring. We’ve taken something that, conceptually, contains the range of all things unexplainable, extraordinary, and mystical, and compressed it into essentially an invisible sack of hand grenades. This isn’t just a…