It has begun! 105 minutes ago the theme was announced: Evolution. Fuckin’. Lame. Or so I thought. There’s already tons of games based on evolution, I thought. One could argue that basically every RPG is themed around evolution to some…
Hey. We’re going to be interrupting our regularly scheduled essays for MOTHERFUCKING LUDUM DARE. If you’re not familiar, Ludum Dare is a 48 hour game making competition, challenging designers to create a whole game over a weekend. I’ve participated before,…
It’s been interesting to observe the ongoing shitstorm about sexism and misogyny in games as it pulses through the loosely knit ‘gamer’ community, particularly from the perspective of someone who agrees to some extent with people on both of the…
Ten days ago, I drove 500 miles. It took ten hours. I listened to music and podcasts and ate crappy diner food and watched the scenery slide by interminably at great speed, fields turn to mountains turn to forests. Quite…
I don’t seem to play games the way I used to any more. Studying game design changes you. To a certain extent, the change happens when you just play enough games, but actively studying their design catalyzes a greater change.…
There’s been a great deal of debate out there as to whether or not games are art. Well, it’s a very silly debate, since it mostly ends up with a bunch of people who have one definition of art arguing…
So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with these shorter-form essays, 300-500 words, and for the most part I’m really digging the results. 500 words is the perfect length, I think, to capture an idea, and usually…
One of the criticisms I often see levied at World of Warcraft and other such MMORPGs is people saying that playing them is ‘like work.’ By this they mean, I believe, that the gameplay involves a lot of more-or-less tedious…
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…
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…
