Weird
I no longer expend the effort to believe that I belong anywhere. Perhaps this is maturity, or perhaps it’s maturity that I am basically okay with this fact and am secure in my loneliness– for now. It has become easier…
Category Essays
Empty Calories
The tricky thing about procrastination is how satisfying it is. Say what you will, when your problem is that you’re stressing over a deadline, just doing nothing and letting the deadline slip is a definite solution to that problem, and…
Silence
We are so often so inundated with sound that being in a genuinely quiet environment is a strangely potent experience. Right now, the weight of the silence is sufficient enough that I feel obtrusive by tapping at the keyboard, and…
Spatial Awareness
Playing Dark Souls has gotten me thinking about the different ways that games structure their world. I really want to describe, in a concrete way, what makes exploring the world of Dark Souls feel like such a different experience from…
Underneath
Why is horror appealing? The only thought more terrifying than that we might not be alone is the thought that we might, indeed, be alone. The only belief more terrifying than that there are weird and unexplainable things going on,…
Making a Concession Stand
It takes a lot of concessions to make a game feasible. Some of these are made early on, settling on a conservative and traditional design paradigm that has already been well explored by other games: Some of these are made…
Backtracking
And just like dreams the games we play fall away from us when they are complete, and just like dreams they are easily forgotten and then remembered at random many years later, and just like dreams they slip by in…
Rules vs Mechanics
The discipline of game design is only recently, spurred by the financial and popular success of modern video games, beginning to be explored in a formal way. Because of this newness, there tends to still be a lot of ambiguity…
Struggle
I’ve just begun playing Dark Souls. I’m not very far into it. I’m not used to this degree of relentless pressure, this viscous viciousness that must be pressed through to progress. It’s clear that there is a path to victory,…
Restraint
Entertainment isn’t what it used to be. Then again, it never is. Every new form of entertainment comes with new problems to solve– some of them logistical, some of them ethical, and some of them legal. Thus it is with…