Symbolic
We operate by symbols. Everything we think we see is, by the time we perceive it, converted from the light that enters our eyes into a collection of ideas, into symbols for objects and creatures we know – or, for…
Category Essays
Tension
A few weeks ago I wrote about how insufficient the idea of all stories being rooted in conflict is – actually, I mostly wrote about how our assumption that conflict is the core of stories affects the way we design…
Tick Rate
I’m uncomfortable with the passage of time. I dislike it, and because time flies when you’re having fun I retain a slight antipathy for having fun as well. I usually try to have fun anyway, but a bit begrudgingly, acutely…
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…
Conflicted
They say there’s no story without conflict. I don’t really understand why this is said so often and with such confidence, but that seems to be how we teach fiction-writing around these parts because I’ve heard it a lot. I…
Influence
The relationship between power, success, and ethics is a tricky one. We’re all expected to try to achieve success in our chosen fields and, though to some degree we define it differently from field to field, in large part ‘success’…
Progress
Games are about progress – I can state this with some confidence since it’s a natural outgrowth of games both as narrative works and games as systems which generate results from input. Even games that are technically endless are built…
Roles
The term role-playing is applied very loosely to games. Not only has it come to mean something completely different when used to describe video games than the pen-and-paper games that originated it, but it has drifted away from its obvious…
To Sleep
I have been trying to fix the way I sleep. My general habit, over the last decade or so, has been to stay awake until I get tired, then go to sleep until I wake up. This is nice in…
Words
I don’t consider myself exceptionally awkward in social situations, but I don’t think I’m particularly comfortable in them either. Much of the time, particularly in emotionally loaded moments, I have no idea what to say – no idea what an…