What obligation do we have to our creations? In the film Ex Machina, the character Nathan, designer of an apparently fully conscious artificial intelligence, is shown through the story to be abusive to his creations, a tyrant, a monster. He…
Dark souls is frequently described as masochistically difficult. I don’t think this is very apt: Masochism implies a state of being acted upon, of being made to suffer by an outside force. Dark Souls never makes you do anything, only…
There’s an argument that’s been floating around in game design circles for a while that if, say, you have an idea for a game, if you could possibly express that idea using any other medium then you probably shouldn’t be…
There are certain common threads that run through stories about violence. Violence has consequences – this is almost the very definition of violence. When you forcibly enact your will upon the world, things change, and often not in the ways you…
I’ve been playing around with the Source Filmmaker animation tool a bit; it’s a strange experience. We spend so much time crafting illusory people, characters constructed piece by piece out of textures and polygons and recorded lines of dialogue, and…
There’s a smarmy and not particularly accurate saying: “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” This is only true for some very specific forms of comedy, and those mostly not the funniest sort, but there’s still an element of truth there. Old…
It’s strange how many games have announcers and narrators now. Though Bastion was noteworthy for the extent and character of its narration, the seeds were sown earlier – somewhere in the gap between the expected announcers of sports games and…
Yeah. the title just didn’t feel quite right without an exclamation mark. I’m not sure why ‘JazzPunk!’ isn’t the official title, because if any game deserves exclamation marks it’s this one. The entire experience of JazzPunk revolves around Surprise! With…
moderate spoilers Space is fucking cool. I mean there’s a lot more to say about The Swapper, but I think that may be its most lasting impression of the game on my mind. No other 2d platformer has captured the…
Well, missed last weeks update due to holiday craziness. I worked as much as I could, but it was pretty difficult to sneak time in for it between everything else that was going on. I’ve mostly been working on a…
