Uneven Balance
One of the most hazardous unquestioned assumptions of game design is that a game should be balanced. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly can be an issue if one tool is too strong, or many tools too weak, particularly in…
Tag Games Criticism
Living Failures
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…
Animalistic
Something that frequently bothers me is the way animals are treated in games. There are a few dimensions to this: Often, the only animals represented in a game are those which pose a direct threat, aggressive predators which attack at…
Some Steam Reviews I Wrote
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which I’ve been perpetually putting off, is writing some short Steam reviews for the games I’ve played over the past few years. I have read from many sources that hitting…
Interesting Choice
“A game is a series of interesting choices” – Sid Meier The above quote is one of the first foundational ideas one encounters when studying game design. Sid Meier, most well known as the designer of the Civilization series of…
The Widening Gyre
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,…
The Building is in the Building is in the Building is in…
There are two kinds of bad procedural content: The first is the generic kind, made by connecting a bunch of random rooms and hallways together, all technically unique but functionally identical. The second is made by connecting pre-authored pieces together…
Multimedia
What’s interesting about games as a medium is that, as I touched on briefly last week, they aren’t a medium in any substantial sense. Yes, there are certain expectations and technical restraints and conventions, but nothing that can’t be easily…
Patrolling the Premises
I recently read this article decrying the famous trolley problem’s newfound fame and ubiquity. While I may have quibbles regarding some of its arguments, I still found it a very interesting and thought-provoking piece. I’d like to, for the moment,…
Doki Doki Literature Club
This week I played through Doki Doki Literature Club, which is a game I’d been vaguely aware of as a harrowing anime experience but, honestly, that describes several games, so it wasn’t really distinct in my mind. I’d like to…