Anniversary
Three years ago this month I started this blog. It was a hot Summer day like this, because that’s how years work, and I’d had a few solid shots of vodka for no reason in particular, but that probably contributed…
Category Essays
Team Colors
It’s useful knowing what team you’re on. Red vs Blue, Shirts vs Skins, Us vs Them: In game design, we try to make that difference obvious on first glance, we make the shapes different, tall and thin vs short and…
Tiny Gods
One appealing aspect of religion is that it lets us presume our world is crafted with the same care and intent that we put into our art. The difference here isn’t a matter of intelligent design vs unintelligent design – to…
The Unknowable
Games tend to offer us questions just so they can supply the answers. In life, a vast amount of information is lost forever. Most of it is unimportant: For most people, it’s impossible to know, say, what they had for…
Self-Aware
What obligation do we have to our creations? In the film Ex Machina, the character Nathan, designer of an apparently fully conscious artificial intelligence, is shown through the story to be abusive to his creations, a tyrant, a monster. He…
Balancing Numbers
There’s an issue I’ve noticed comes up a lot in game design, particularly when it comes to balancing items and abilities against each other: The differentiation and conflation of absolute and relative values. Here’s the first place I noticed it:…
Listen
Dark souls is frequently described as masochistically difficult. I don’t think this is very apt: Masochism implies a state of being acted upon, of being made to suffer by an outside force. Dark Souls never makes you do anything, only…
War Stories
America has a relationship with violence that is, let’s say, a little too friendly. That’s not to say that the American mindset is violent necessarily, that we are predisposed to do violence, but that so much of our outlook is…
Game Jammed
I’ve participated in a couple of game jams with moderate success, but ever since I started working daily on my own long-term game project I’ve found it impossible, Whenever I start to participate in a game jam, a few things…
Hexagon
The biggest difference between Super Hexagon and other similar games, fast paced reaction endurance challenges like Flappy Bird and Canabalt and Race the Sun, is that the presentation is inverted. You aren’t running away from or towards anything, but rolling…