The Forest for the Trees
I’ve been struggling a bit to find a topic I want to write about this week, and upon extensive reflection I thought it might be a good idea to write about how I’ve been struggling a bit to find a…
Category Diagnosticism
Accomplices
Games are a strange and delicate string of analogies. A button with an X on it is a jump, a button with a Y on it is a punch to a stranger’s face, and within the context of the game…
Capability, Exclusion, and Diversity
How we see the world shapes the things we create. This is an obvious statement, but some of the implications are rarely considered. For instance, we rarely consider the effect that our physical capabilities have on our worldview. This actually…
Spiraling Shape
This could lead to excellence Or serious injury Only one way to know Go, go, go Go ahead, wreck your life That might be good Who can say what’s wrong or right? Nobody can There is no coherent way for…
Abstraction Layer
Video games are, at their most fundamental level, a collection of numbers. Anyone who’s done any programming has seen this in action, of course, and had a direct hand in what those numbers are and what they represent. There are…
Eve DevBlog 9: The Devil’s in the Details
It hardly bears mentioning at this point that things are crazy, chaotic, and depressing, so let’s just bypass that phase of the update and move on to the good stuff this week shall we? I’ve got the interface for the…
Hotline Miami: Critical Analysis
Doing reviews and analyses of specific games is kind of out of form for Problem Machine, but I seem to be doing it a lot nowadays regardless. The thing is, I’ve been playing these games and they’re just too damn…
Frog Fractions
Last week I played Frog Fractions. Frog Fractions is a fun game! In Frog Fractions, you play as a 4frog. Bugs try to eat your fruit so you have to eat the bugs. When you eat the bugs you get…
Agency and Narrative: Half-Life
All of this was originally an illustrative example within the earlier post Agency and Narrative. However, at one point this example ended up taking up about half the essay, so I decided to post it up later as supplemental material.…
This is Halloween
Short update today, things have been busy. I think I have some bonus material I can put up to compensate on Monday morning though… I, like most white people, am fond of Halloween. There’s a few things I like about…