Gems
Something that struck me powerfully the first time I played Super Hexagon, and which has always hovered at the back of my mind as I play it, is how easily it could have been a different game. Most games are…
Category Essays
The Weight of Worlds
I imagine a giant, immensely powerful but unwilling to move because of the unbearable inertia of his massive body. He has such power, but he gives it up every day and chooses instead to tell his servant to fetch him…
Solipsism
He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so…
Magic and Realism
What do we owe reality? It’s an interesting question for artists of all sorts: How important is reality to our art, how far can we warp it before we lose relevance and begin to disappear up our own asses? This…
The Contract
Rules are most of what defines a game, but there tends to be a method, a principle, by which a game’s rules are applied, and these principles, the meta-rules that dictate the design of the game to the designers, are…
The Producers
My last full-time real-person job was as a developer of little Flash games, mostly promotional tie-ins with childrens’ cartoons. More recently, as you may have seen in the recent Eve DevBlogs, I’ve been working quite hard on creating my own…
The Forest for the Trees
I’ve been struggling a bit to find a topic I want to write about this week, and upon extensive reflection I thought it might be a good idea to write about how I’ve been struggling a bit to find a…
Strange Places
There is something bleak and beautiful and strange about old games that will always pull at my soul. Is it nostalgia? Perhaps. Nostalgia is certainly a component. It’s always a bit strange seeing a movie I loved as a child,…
Momentum
There is a satisfaction in getting something done– whether or not it is a thing which is useful. Action is fulfilling. It often feels wrong to stay in one place, it feels like the world is moving too fast for…
Balance and Expression
The capability that games offer for self-expression is exciting, but can also be onerous. In much the same way as we are made uncomfortable by articles telling us what the way we move or dress or speak says about us,…