Needs Must
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains All the cops have wooden legs And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs The farmers’ trees are full of fruit And the barns are full of hay Oh…
Category Writing
Response
Games are, generally, engines for responding to player input. Whether the game feels good is largely a matter of how robust the response is – robust both in how closely it interacts with the player’s input and in how well-constructed…
Puzzling
I thought of a piece to write but I realized I didn’t have much to say about it. I was going to discuss the texture of canvas and brush and how they work to create texture in a painting, how…
Recommendations
I don’t like making recommendations. Other people seem to be very comfortable with it. For many, the calculation seems quite straightforward: “I enjoyed it, so I recommend it. I didn’t enjoy it, so I don’t recommend it”. I envy the…
Waxing Nostalgic
It’s hard to be critical without becoming a curmudgeon. There’s a natural process that occurs: I have an opinion about a game or other work. Someone disagrees with that opinion. To defend my opinion, I restate it in new terms,…
Zeroes and Heroes
How is a number like a hero? How is an equation like a tragedy? First: The world as we perceive is not the world as it is. As we perceive the world we live in, through our sense of sight…
In Place
I’ve spent so long feeling I am training to create greatness that I cannot countenance the idea that anything I’ve created might be good already, or to describe it as such. Every creation is a learning experience, it’s true, but…
Meaning It
Children will believe basically anything. That’s their job. At some point later in life, there’s usually some form of disillusionment, and we learn to distrust the motives of others, to believe that we are being manipulated. Afterwards we find that…
The Earnestness of Importance
Television has changed a lot over the last couple of decades. No longer bound to the yoke of short run times and advertisements, TV shows have started becoming more like movies: Longer, more intricate, with a consistent story told between…
JazzPunk!
Yeah. the title just didn’t feel quite right without an exclamation mark. I’m not sure why ‘JazzPunk!’ isn’t the official title, because if any game deserves exclamation marks it’s this one. The entire experience of JazzPunk revolves around Surprise! With…