A little while ago I was participating in a conversation about the nature of causality and whether the information we have supports the idea of a deterministic universe, and I found myself getting perhaps uncharacteristically defensive. If you aren’t familiar…
Kaiji is a manga about a young man named Itou Kaiji driven into a series of increasingly desperate and outlandish gambles to escape debt and save his own life. The first two parts of have received animated adaptations, but currently…
For a long time I didn’t like to use a microphone while playing games. I’m still not thrilled about the idea of talking into my computer while playing with strangers, but I’ve gotten used to the concept enough to be…
I’ve been self-employed for a while now, which is a way of saying that I don’t have a job but I still scrape by and I hold out hope that one day my hobbies will make me money. It’s taken…
Well it’s not quite the 10th, is it? Ah well, it keeps rolling around to the next month and I want to have something more impressive to show for the time I’ve spent and it just makes me fall further…
Listen. It is embarrassing how much time we spend making noise, talking about ourselves, what we care about, how we see the world. We surround ourselves in our own territorial stench so we don’t have to smell anything around us.…
Parables are a powerful tool. They are maps, life lessons encoded into little stories, encapsulated ways of understanding the world. However, what a parable is is as much our understanding of the tale as it is the tale itself –…
Anyone who’s been playing games for a while has probably, by now, encountered the concept of experience points and leveling up in a number of different contexts. I find nowadays that I’m enjoying this design trope less, that I’m less…
Most games are power fantasies. It would be nice, perhaps, if games focused on providing more diverse and interesting experiences, but, still, there’s nothing wrong with a good power fantasy… right? However, sometimes creating that fantasy of capability involves undermining…
Games, as a medium, have been rediscovering the art of the secret, of the hidden. For a while, around the mid ’00s, it was incredibly rare for games to be anything beyond just what they appeared to be – and…
