The Language of Blood
There is little overlap: There are those privileged to speak the language of blood, and those who are too weak to learn it. This is, we learn, the way the story must be told, the way of the world.
Category Exploring Transgression
The Corruption
I find most game stories extremely obnoxious. Beyond the irritations with craftsmanship and cliche, beyond being merely bored and annoyed, there are patterns I see over and over again in intros and cutscenes and store pages that are distastefully tedious…
Telling Stories in School
After watching through Better Call Saul I apparently decided I still didn’t have enough anxiety in my life and subsequently binged through Barry – a comedy series following a hitman, played by Bill Hader, who stumbles into a Los Angeles…
Made to Order
Solving a problem is one of the most satisfying sensations in the world. Often this satisfaction is preceded by hours, days, months, or years of tedium and frustration as we struggle to understand the problem, collect the tools and skills…
Lowering the Stakes
The vampire, as a storytelling trope, makes for stories that alternately fascinate and frustrate me. As something which is both human and not, alive and also dead, eternal and fragile, they can be a powerful lens through which to view…
Everhood: False Endings, Truths, Choices, and Hope
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Power/Fantasy
I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change…
Other Minds
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…
Patient Zero
We think of art as something which we create and then put out in the world, where it affects others and perhaps, in some small way, changes them. What we often ignore or disregard is that in addition to being…
Breaking, Unbroken
Something I used to think about a lot was what we mean when we use the term ‘free will.’ Some people argue a great deal over whether it exists, which has always seemed a bit silly to me: The so-called…