Big and Small, Near and Far
One of the trickiest parts of art – with the understanding that art is entirely made of tricky parts – is the comprehension of proportion and perspective. There is, in one sense, a lot of wiggle room here – we…
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Buying Time
We’re running out of time, or time is running out on us. I have a problem with boundaries – not with interpersonal boundaries, but with perceiving divisions in a continuum. How do you decide where a river ends and the…
The Widening Gyre
The ‘roguelike’ genre started, appropriately enough, with the game ‘Rogue’ in the year 1980. Rogue was an appealing but simplistic game, a primitive ASCII-based RPG. Soon more robust imitators came along, extrapolating on its mechanics to make more complex worlds,…
Septembers
The lights are projections on slate-gray screens A sneak preview of a nuclear winter The orange seeps in like rusty water A sneak peek at a burning eternity Every moment is a tiny apocalypse The world is ending for somebody…
Unique
There’s a desire, when making something, to have the creation be somehow new and unprecedented, unique, unlike anything that has come before. This can create issues – while ideally every work should offer something new, it is not necessary or…
Portrait
Your lips are intriguing, a sheath for your teeth, a curled pearl snarl or wrap around rocks, singing a song or intoning a poem, bent up in symbols known only to you. Cheeks rising with lips and eclipsing the eyes,…
Ashes
“How am I so confident?” She rubbed her lips, I think imagining another version of herself taking a cool film noir drag on a cigarette. “Am I? No, no I’m just good at not acting, uh, unconfident? Nervous. Whatever. I’m…
Frustration
What role should frustration have in the player’s experience of a game? It’s a tricky question. For a while game designers assumed the answer was ‘none’, that frustration was an inherently unpleasant experience with nothing to offer, that it stood…
The Idea Of The Thing
Something I’ve learned anew with each new medium I tackle is that, as much as the breadth and reach of human imagination is amazing, imagination is terrible at the details. Starting out, when one has an idea for a piece…
The Dark
I would almost say that fear of the unknown is the only real kind, but that seems difficult to defend. Certainly, the fear that the guy who told you he would cut your arm off at 3:15pm next Tuesday will…