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,…
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…
Lies
Fictional lies pose an interesting challenge. With the (many) lies we encounter in our daily lives, we understand that there is a reality that these lies are purposefully misrepresenting – that, even if we don’t know the truth, there is…
Wearing War
Not too long ago, and for a lot of the history of video games, the visual quality of a game has been decided entirely on how ‘realistic’ the graphics are. Using photo textures, true-to-life lighting models, and increasingly sophisticated shading…
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…
Phoblem Machine
I love pho. I originally got hooked on it when I was living in San Francisco and you could buy it on maybe 10% of the street corners city-wide, and have continued to eat it regularly everywhere I moved afterwards.…
Fantasy Patch Notes for Dishonored
I’ve been playing a lot of Dishonored over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been, for the most part, loving my time with it. Of course, the more I enjoy a game, the more frustrated I get with the…
Situational
Playing a game is learning a set of habits, a set of reactions, and trying to tune and optimize those habits and reactions towards those that most frequently successfully achieve the game’s goal. Calling it a strategy might, sometimes, seem…
Live
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been trying to livestream more gameplay (currently with a tenuous schedule of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday @ 8pm, ). It’s interesting the sorts of pressures that streaming your gameplay puts on you – it…
Obstacles and Expression
Difficulty can serve several important roles in a game’s design: It can create an aesthetic sense of danger and foreboding, it can make the actions of the player feel more consequential, and it can push the player to vary their…