The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for…
There’s a very special kind of annoyance when it becomes obvious that a work of art that you really like has actually impacted its medium for the worse. For instance, while I quite like the film Inception, for years afterwards…
“In my restless dreams, I see that town.” I miss Silent Hill. The games are still around, of course, and perhaps I ought to replay them – but you can’t really go back, and any replay is going to be…
The ‘roguelike’ genre started, appropriately enough, with the game ‘Rogue’ in the year 1980. Rogue was an appealing but simplistic game, a primitive ASCII-based RPG. Soon more robust imitators came along, extrapolating on its mechanics to make more complex worlds,…
Game graphics have increasingly emphasized their ability to capture fine detail – details such as skin texture, fine creases in fabric, and ornate stone and metalwork. We’ve increased poly count, we’ve gone from flat textures to bump maps to normal…
Game design is a trust exercise. The player has to be able to trust that the game designer’s decisions make sense, that when they take an action within the system the resultant reaction will make sense and be predictable. “Predictable”…
I finished my playthrough of Sekiro a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve had some time to sit and reflect on the experience. If you aren’t familiar with Sekiro, it’s the newest game by From Software, developers of the Dark…
Difficulty has come back into fashion for video games. Many games now specifically go out of their way to cultivate a reputation as especially difficult, whereas not too long ago it was common for designers to regard any failure of…
There’s a way of talking about games that’s begun to bother me – most games, when we describe and discuss them, particularly in comparison to one another, tend to get boiled down to one or two focal points, a gimmick…
