Silent Hill: The Bad Place
“In my restless dreams, I see that town.” I miss Silent Hill. The games are still around, of course, and perhaps I ought to replay them – but you can’t really go back, and any replay is going to be…
Category Essays
Incompletions and Imperfections
I’ve been falling pretty far behind on these little nominally-weekly essays again. These delays probably started with Elden Ring, but the reasons why I haven’t gotten caught back up are a bit more nuanced and interesting – though some of…
Tangled, Intangible
One of the most valuable skills I’ve been developing, mostly without realizing I was developing it, is an understanding of what my limitations are and of accepting those limitations. This is not an understanding I readily relinquished myself to: My…
Presence Tension
I don’t deal well with scheduling. Any time I try to schedule myself, to block out what I’m going to be doing and when, days or weeks ahead of time, I get frustrated. I can’t help but rattle against the…
Defunned
As a rule, I usually avoid writing about “fun.” I don’t feel “Fun” is a very useful term for analyzing game design – it’s poorly defined, it’s subjective, it’s regarded as a self-evidently good thing to have. In short, “fun”…
A Frayed Knot
There is much to be said in favor of creative systems-oriented thinking. Many problems can be solved by breaking them down into sets of mutually influential factors, many occurrences can be understood by tracing the thread of causality from one…
Lowering the Stakes
The vampire, as a storytelling trope, makes for stories that alternately fascinate and frustrate me. As something which is both human and not, alive and also dead, eternal and fragile, they can be a powerful lens through which to view…
Between the Bones
We educate ourselves in the arts trying to learn how to create better art, but the process of improvement is a strange and unsteady one and the paths we take don’t always lead where they seem to. The main thing…
Balancing in the Middle
For a while there was a trend of providing a moral choice to players: The choice between Good and Evil. My understanding is that this idea probably started with Ultima IV in 1985 – but when I think about “moral…
Some Steam Reviews I Wrote
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which I’ve been perpetually putting off, is writing some short Steam reviews for the games I’ve played over the past few years. I have read from many sources that hitting…