Is luck fun? Games, and those who play them, have a somewhat tense and delicate relationship with luck and randomness. In the best case, adding some randomness to a game can create unexpected and delightful variations on the basic challenge…
There is a process which repeats, a cycle with no end in sight. As my skill grows, my ability to recognize my own flaws grows with it, and thus, from my perspective, it appears that I’m not growing more skillful…
The line between playing games and watching them has been blurred once more, in a rather interesting way, by the huge success of Twitch Plays Pokemon. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Twitch Plays Pokemon is an event which…
I’ve been holding off on writing this for some time. I got Rogue Legacy shortly after its release, something unusual for me, because I wanted to play it as soon as I saw it. On paper it seemed like the…
I spend a lot of my time in games. I work in games, I play in games. Sometimes I dream in games. When the energy it would require to actually play feels like too much, I’ll watch someone else play.…
The names we give things can be so unexpectedly revealing sometimes. I saw a play a few days ago. It was a good play, but that’s not relevant. This was the last staging of this show, though, and as someone…
I’m dropped on a planet with nothing but a few simple imperatives to point the way. The sensation is familiar, but the world is a stranger. Mushrooms grow maybe 30 feet tall here. Strange creatures wander around, and some of…
I would almost say that fear of the unknown is the only real kind, but that seems difficult to defend. Certainly, the fear that the guy who told you he would cut your arm off at 3:15pm next Tuesday will…
When we control something we become it. When we steer the car we feel the texture of the road and adopt its dimensions as our own, and feel the tiny scrapes and impacts that scar her surface in our teeth…
The problem with always saving the world is that it necessitates that the world be always broken. The problem with the world being always broken is that it surrenders the idea of it ever being better. Our games cast us…
