Noise
I ran a fan every moment of every day, for three or four months, over the Summer. Now that the temperature has cooled down, I turned the fan off and immediately began to feel uncomfortable. I could hear too much,…
Category Playing Games
ProMaRaRo 4: Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus
I didn’t play it. Well, technically I did. I played for 40 minutes or so. That was long enough for me to remember what an unpleasant, albeit intriguing, world that Oddworld is. Abe, the player character, seems to be the…
ProMaRaRo 3: Anodyne
I like Anodyne. I liked it more than I expected to, in all honesty: I was expecting a solid and aesthetically pleasing retro-gaming experience, but what I found was something much stranger and more beautiful than I had anticipated. Anodyne…
A Real Sum of a Glitch
Around this time last week, I discussed how games have a hard time portraying the unreliability of memories because this erodes the player’s ability to trust the information they’re receiving from the game. I’ve been thinking about that, and it…
ProMaRaRo 1: Cthulhu Saves the World
Sigh. Okay. Well, first, a confession: I didn’t finish the game. I didn’t even reach the 10 hours I’d planned on as giving a game a good solid chance before moving on. I played for about 6 hours. And here’s…
Bitter Man
I seem to be hating a lot of things recently. I’ve always been mature for my age, so I think at 30 I may have started to cross over into crotchety old man territory. If I had a lawn and…
The Problem Machine Random Routine
So, last week at around this time I made a post discussing how trying to control how we experience things too tightly can easily lead into us never experiencing them at all. I trailed off at the end with a…
Experienced
The more we think about how we tend to experience art, the more we’re forced to notice how little of our experience comes from the piece itself. This is not to devalue the importance of artistry or artifice, but to…
Out of Control
I’ve been thinking about bad controls in games. What does it mean when people say that a game has bad controls? Usually, more often than not, they mean that it’s difficult to control. The more games I play, though, the…
Fetch
Usually it’s a tennis ball: Sometimes (not often), still recognizable as such. She digs it out from among the tall weeds and brings it to me, and I throw it, and she runs out and grabs it and brings it…