Within Beauty
There’s been a great deal of debate out there as to whether or not games are art. Well, it’s a very silly debate, since it mostly ends up with a bunch of people who have one definition of art arguing…
Category Playing Games
All Creation
Sometimes, it is very hard to write. A couple of months ago, I went with a friend to a cafe to do some work. I had intended to try to do some programming, but when I tried to make my…
Worklike
One of the criticisms I often see levied at World of Warcraft and other such MMORPGs is people saying that playing them is ‘like work.’ By this they mean, I believe, that the gameplay involves a lot of more-or-less tedious…
Playing in Character
Game genres are a strange and many-splendored thing, a grab-bag of features and perspectives and settings which came together through common usage and convention. The games came first, then the words to describe those games, then the genre classifications built…
Cartoonish Supervillainy
“If your idea of a home security system is a pit full of lava– you might be a supervillain.” Games are simulations. They may not be simulating reality in any substantial way, but by their nature as systems they are internally…
The Devil’s Gaming Glossary
I am super tired today, so rather than a new essay I’m going to be sharing with you the work I’ve done so far on a project for this site. This is the start of a glossary of gaming terms…
Challenge and Consequence 2: The Reckoning
The Challenge Challenge in competitive games is a tricky beast. While it’s largely the case that the challenge of your experience is determined by the skill of the players you’re competing against, the game design itself contributes to the challenge…