Games have a weird relationship with morality. For a while, many were including ham-fisted ‘morality systems’ – absurd contrivances where you were presented with two exaggerated choices, choosing between senseless slaughter and saintly forgiveness, and then assigned to be good…
The ‘roguelike’ genre started, appropriately enough, with the game ‘Rogue’ in the year 1980. Rogue was an appealing but simplistic game, a primitive ASCII-based RPG. Soon more robust imitators came along, extrapolating on its mechanics to make more complex worlds,…
The study of game design is, to a significant degree, the study of education. Much as the joy of gameplay lies in the sensation of learning and practicing, the skill of creating that joy in others is similar to that…
While as an artist I am generally fascinated with the study of technique, and the methods of self-improvement necessary to attain it, I find myself less and less interested in art which exists solely or primarily to be a showcase…
There’s two desires that motivate creativity: There’s the desire to create, to pour a part of yourself into crafting art by some sort of cathartic action; and there’s the desire to have created, to have generated some idea, given it…
It’s daunting to imagine all the things I’ve forgotten. What percentage of a life gets remembered? A slender one for certain – even the people and events we remember we remember in silhouette, in snippets of noise and face and…
I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office when I happened to glance upwards. There was a cutout between the first floor, which I was on, and the walkways of the second. This rectangle was lined by…
There are two kinds of bad procedural content: The first is the generic kind, made by connecting a bunch of random rooms and hallways together, all technically unique but functionally identical. The second is made by connecting pre-authored pieces together…
It’s a new year, and I feel very odd. Estranged from myself – not by some sort of sudden disconnect, but as though I’ve grown so far from the architecture that defines me that I no longer feel like I…
I was thinking about the line “beauty is truth, truth beauty” – which, it turns out, is from the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, but I first heard on The Simpsons and had not until now…
