It’s very frustrating, sometimes, being an artist who is both terrible at and temperamentally disinclined from all forms of self-promotion. There’s a yearning to make people look and listen paired with an absolute aversion to the actions that could actually…
I’ve been playing the beta for Hearthstone, Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming online collectable card game. It’s actually difficult for me to justify this as time well spent. It’s not that it’s a bad game – quite the opposite, in fact. I…
We are connected, each day to the last, by the path of our history. Your memories are the map, and every so often you compare the landmarks of your life against what you see on that map and, invariably, if…
I’ve been thinking about bad controls in games. What does it mean when people say that a game has bad controls? Usually, more often than not, they mean that it’s difficult to control. The more games I play, though, the…
Usually it’s a tennis ball: Sometimes (not often), still recognizable as such. She digs it out from among the tall weeds and brings it to me, and I throw it, and she runs out and grabs it and brings it…
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how games and other works ask us to engage with them. Each work of art exists within a greater context, and how we parse the messages those works engender is affected…
The tricky thing about procrastination is how satisfying it is. Say what you will, when your problem is that you’re stressing over a deadline, just doing nothing and letting the deadline slip is a definite solution to that problem, and…
Playing Dark Souls has gotten me thinking about the different ways that games structure their world. I really want to describe, in a concrete way, what makes exploring the world of Dark Souls feel like such a different experience from…
The discipline of game design is only recently, spurred by the financial and popular success of modern video games, beginning to be explored in a formal way. Because of this newness, there tends to still be a lot of ambiguity…
Art in general and games in particular have an uncomfortable relationship with discomfort. People don’t like being made uncomfortable– at least, not when it’s called by that name. Really, though, discomfort tends to come hand-in-hand with novelty. Anything that’s new…
