Cut Loose
I have been thinking about sorrow, because I feel sad, or at least morose. I think of Silent Hill 2, and what a powerful experience it was for me because, unlike most games, it was unrepentantly tragic. I like the…
Category Essays
Empowerment
A thing that many people say about video games is that they are empowerment fantasies. This is apparently axiomatic. I have never seen it challenged. Is that why we play video games? I believe that this grazes against the truth, but…
Things keep happening
This week is proving to be, even by recent standards, exceptionally chaotic. I’m not sure if I’ll have the time for the usual two-essays a week, so instead I’m going to try to post a few mini-essays, 200-500 words in…
Playing in Character
Game genres are a strange and many-splendored thing, a grab-bag of features and perspectives and settings which came together through common usage and convention. The games came first, then the words to describe those games, then the genre classifications built…
Cartoonish Supervillainy
“If your idea of a home security system is a pit full of lava– you might be a supervillain.” Games are simulations. They may not be simulating reality in any substantial way, but by their nature as systems they are internally…
Into the Narrative Space
(This is a follow-up to my previous essay on conceiving a game as the intersection of three spaces, world space, design space, and narrative space. If you haven’t yet, you should go back and read it now.) Regardless of how…
Three Spaces
The first essay I wrote for Problem Machine described experiencing the design of a game in a sense analogous to exploring a physical space, as well as drawing comparisons between exposing game design elements (clumsily) and exposing narrative elements. I’d…
The Passion of the Croft
The game space is a controversial place to be right now. A perfect storm of people exploring sexism in games, gamers being misogynist fuckhats, and clueless developers talking excitedly about how they’re going to treat their female leads in new…
Expressive Play
I’m not going to claim that the concept of self-expression in games is a new one. There’s always some new game coming out boasting its level of customization which allows players to express their personalities in new and exciting ways…
Groundhog Day
“And maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll both live again, well I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, don’t think so.” I am sitting in front of my computer trying to write an article. I am confident that…