Power/Fantasy
I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change…
Category Essays
Better Mousetraps
I think if there’s one idea I’d seek to dismantle, it’s the idea that there’s a single correct way to do something. I believe that this approach creates problems for two reasons: First, similarity of approach tends to lead to…
Execute
I still find it fascinating to think how often we make stories about machines rising up to destroy us. There’s probably a few anxieties tangled up together in these narratives, and it’s intriguing pulling on those threads to see where…
In the Shade
I’ve been spending much of the last year, and particularly of the last couple of weeks, finally seriously pursuing a field of programming I’ve long found fascinating: Shaders. This is the perfect field for programmers who are also visual artists,…
Thematic
After you spend a little while doing creative work, you tend to notice certain themes recurring throughout your creations. I have written here about my current project, EverEnding, but seldom in terms of its story and themes – I haven’t…
Miniature
Stories are terrifyingly powerful in a way we frequently don’t notice. Everyone knows the difference between fiction and reality, or they think they do – and, indeed, they probably know the difference between real and fictional events, but that’s not…
Other Minds
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…
Show and Tell
“Come in, come in,” he mutters, edging around the heavy dark desk, moving carefully, perhaps a bit stiffly, to avoid knocking over the books and papers piled, half-read, along its outer reaches. “I’ve been hoping to see you for a…
Matryoshka
I watched the movie Synecdoche, New York last night. I say this, not to position what follows as a review, but to give context. I often worry that the connections my brain makes might come off as garbled nonsense to…
Patient Zero
We think of art as something which we create and then put out in the world, where it affects others and perhaps, in some small way, changes them. What we often ignore or disregard is that in addition to being…