Hotline Miami: Critical Analysis
Doing reviews and analyses of specific games is kind of out of form for Problem Machine, but I seem to be doing it a lot nowadays regardless. The thing is, I’ve been playing these games and they’re just too damn…
Category Narrative Design
Frog Fractions
Last week I played Frog Fractions. Frog Fractions is a fun game! In Frog Fractions, you play as a 4frog. Bugs try to eat your fruit so you have to eat the bugs. When you eat the bugs you get…
Agency and Narrative: Half-Life
All of this was originally an illustrative example within the earlier post Agency and Narrative. However, at one point this example ended up taking up about half the essay, so I decided to post it up later as supplemental material.…
This is Halloween
Short update today, things have been busy. I think I have some bonus material I can put up to compensate on Monday morning though… I, like most white people, am fond of Halloween. There’s a few things I like about…
Eve DevBlog 6: More blog, less dev!
Worst week for the project thus far! May as well just get that out there right away and say it, and I’m not thrilled about that since last week was also pretty bad. Oh well. There’s gonna be bad weeks,…
Exploring Transgression 1
There’s a huge subject I’d like to tackle, but it’s a bit difficult for me to pin down. It’s something I feel very strongly about, and because I feel so strongly it tends to bleed into a lot of apparently…
Artificial Neuroticism
In games everything has a clear cause and effect. If you get your face stomped by a cyclops, it’s because you forgot to re-equip your Axe of Extravagant Evisceration after using the Feather Duster of Tidiness for that side-quest, or…
Agency and Narrative
“Anyone who prioritizes the delivery of narrative over support for player agency fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the medium.” – Bizarro Hepler I recently encountered this quotation in my twitter feed, and it got me thinking. I generally agree with…
Reduction of Metaphor
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience…
Predictability or Inevitability
A little while back, I discussed how experienced and incisive players of video games begin to perceive the hand of the designer, to predict his aims, and infer information which the surface layer of the game doesn’t communicate in order…