The Problem Machine Random Routine
So, last week at around this time I made a post discussing how trying to control how we experience things too tightly can easily lead into us never experiencing them at all. I trailed off at the end with a…
Category Playing Games
Experienced
The more we think about how we tend to experience art, the more we’re forced to notice how little of our experience comes from the piece itself. This is not to devalue the importance of artistry or artifice, but to…
Out of Control
I’ve been thinking about bad controls in games. What does it mean when people say that a game has bad controls? Usually, more often than not, they mean that it’s difficult to control. The more games I play, though, the…
Fetch
Usually it’s a tennis ball: Sometimes (not often), still recognizable as such. She digs it out from among the tall weeds and brings it to me, and I throw it, and she runs out and grabs it and brings it…
First Impressions
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how games and other works ask us to engage with them. Each work of art exists within a greater context, and how we parse the messages those works engender is affected…
Empty Calories
The tricky thing about procrastination is how satisfying it is. Say what you will, when your problem is that you’re stressing over a deadline, just doing nothing and letting the deadline slip is a definite solution to that problem, and…
Underneath
Why is horror appealing? The only thought more terrifying than that we might not be alone is the thought that we might, indeed, be alone. The only belief more terrifying than that there are weird and unexplainable things going on,…
Backtracking
And just like dreams the games we play fall away from us when they are complete, and just like dreams they are easily forgotten and then remembered at random many years later, and just like dreams they slip by in…
Struggle
I’ve just begun playing Dark Souls. I’m not very far into it. I’m not used to this degree of relentless pressure, this viscous viciousness that must be pressed through to progress. It’s clear that there is a path to victory,…
Sleep
“I don’t know. Why do things happen as they do in dreams?” Things are a bit confused. Things start blending together. I’ve been sleeping a lot. I remember at one point I was hanging out at one of the community…