Cogs
As I worked on last piece about Inscryption, I also played Daniel Mullins’ other games, Pony Island and the Hex – primarily out of a desire to not put my foot in my mouth by making over-broad statements on their…
Category Playing Games
Inscryption – Curses, Sacrifices, and Roads Untraveled
I finished Inscryption a few days ago and feel I should write about it, but I don’t entirely know where to start. Well, let’s start at the outside and work in: Inscryption is, to begin with, a roguelike deck-builder –…
Do Less More
Brevity is the soul of wit. To elaborate: A story is only as good as the best parts the audience remembers. The more extraneous crap is added on top, the less enjoyable that experience might be. Past a certain threshold,…
Everhood: False Endings, Truths, Choices, and Hope
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Playgrounds of Choice
In a traditional narrative medium, moral choice often enters in when a character discovers they can do something that goes against their beliefs to gain some sort of an advantage or object of desire. The audience may perceive the character…
Playing Roles
Games have a weird relationship with morality. For a while, many were including ham-fisted ‘morality systems’ – absurd contrivances where you were presented with two exaggerated choices, choosing between senseless slaughter and saintly forgiveness, and then assigned to be good…
The Building is in the Building is in the Building is in…
There are two kinds of bad procedural content: The first is the generic kind, made by connecting a bunch of random rooms and hallways together, all technically unique but functionally identical. The second is made by connecting pre-authored pieces together…
Power/Fantasy
I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change…
Other Minds
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…
Multimedia
What’s interesting about games as a medium is that, as I touched on briefly last week, they aren’t a medium in any substantial sense. Yes, there are certain expectations and technical restraints and conventions, but nothing that can’t be easily…