Oh well this is awkward. Effective, um, like 5 days ago, the EverEnding project is going on hiatus. For how long? I’m not sure! I’m pretty confident it’s not permanent, but I’m also pretty confident it’s going to be for…
I’ve continued to play a ton of Slay the Spire over the last few weeks, though I’ve dropped off a bit. Even when I’m not playing the game I like to think about the game. I’ve been thinking about one…
Death is omnipresent in games, but they mostly don’t like to acknowledge that. Dying in games is just a way of keeping score, a nice easily understandable failure state, something to be avoided, not experienced. In life, death is omnipresent…
I’ve been playing Cuphead. If you’ve somehow managed not to hear about this game, Cuphead is a 2D platformer styled after the cartoons of the 1930’s – although I frankly think it manages to realize that aesthetic far better than…
I have been spending the last 10 days or so playing way too much Slay the Spire. They say write what you know, and right now my brain knows nothing but the pleasures of building a badass deck to kill…
I recently played through Alpha Protocol, which is an experience I don’t know whether or not to recommend. It is not a good stealth game, but it is a hilarious stealth game: Once you actually level up your character the…
Way back when I started this blog, one of the first essays I did was about conceiving of a game as the combination of three related spaces – physical, mechanical, and narrative – and gameplay as the act of allowing…
Among other ways to think about games, one that I rarely hear spoken of is their capacity as attention engines. Among the many social and emotional needs we have as human beings is our desire to be heard – even…
A game is a collection of symbols and rules for how those symbols can interact with one another. I described these as being obstacles and tools, one of which defines the parameters of success and the other of which are…
Fictional lies pose an interesting challenge. With the (many) lies we encounter in our daily lives, we understand that there is a reality that these lies are purposefully misrepresenting – that, even if we don’t know the truth, there is…
