Announcing: Eve
I am pleased (albeit scared) to finally be able to announce this project. Eve is a game concept that has been lurking in the back of my mind for a couple of years, and I’m incredibly excited to finally see…
Category Narrative Design
Binary World
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…
Cut Loose 2
We keep finding ourselves as amnesiacs and strangers in the games we play. There are practical reasons for this, which have been frequently mentioned by other authors and by myself, in the realms of narrative and game design. The most…
Very Funny Mister
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…
Cut Loose
I have been thinking about sorrow, because I feel sad, or at least morose. I think of Silent Hill 2, and what a powerful experience it was for me because, unlike most games, it was unrepentantly tragic. I like the…
Playing in Character
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…
Cartoonish Supervillainy
“If your idea of a home security system is a pit full of lava– you might be a supervillain.” Games are simulations. They may not be simulating reality in any substantial way, but by their nature as systems they are internally…
Into the Narrative Space
(This is a follow-up to my previous essay on conceiving a game as the intersection of three spaces, world space, design space, and narrative space. If you haven’t yet, you should go back and read it now.) Regardless of how…
Three Spaces
The first essay I wrote for Problem Machine described experiencing the design of a game in a sense analogous to exploring a physical space, as well as drawing comparisons between exposing game design elements (clumsily) and exposing narrative elements. I’d…
The Passion of the Croft
The game space is a controversial place to be right now. A perfect storm of people exploring sexism in games, gamers being misogynist fuckhats, and clueless developers talking excitedly about how they’re going to treat their female leads in new…