Heroes
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…
Tag gaming
Hearthstone: A Review Apparently
I’ve been playing the beta for Hearthstone, Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming online collectable card game. It’s actually difficult for me to justify this as time well spent. It’s not that it’s a bad game – quite the opposite, in fact. I…
Crafting the Path
It is often observed that playing games and making games are different activities. This is kind of obvious, but whatever the technical college advertisements might have you believe, there is more involved in developing a game than playing through it…
True Ending
Endings are hard. Endings are weird. Our effects as humans, as entities and processes, will outlast our lives, never ending but blending instead seamlessly into each other, on and on, forever. Our stories will outlive the process of our bodies,…
ProMaRaRo 4: Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus
I didn’t play it. Well, technically I did. I played for 40 minutes or so. That was long enough for me to remember what an unpleasant, albeit intriguing, world that Oddworld is. Abe, the player character, seems to be the…
ProMaRaRo 3: Anodyne
I like Anodyne. I liked it more than I expected to, in all honesty: I was expecting a solid and aesthetically pleasing retro-gaming experience, but what I found was something much stranger and more beautiful than I had anticipated. Anodyne…
A Real Sum of a Glitch
Around this time last week, I discussed how games have a hard time portraying the unreliability of memories because this erodes the player’s ability to trust the information they’re receiving from the game. I’ve been thinking about that, and it…
Life Story
Every time something new enters our lives, we rewrite our story to accommodate it. We project it into our future, and sometimes into our pasts, in order to construct a story for ourselves that makes sense and tells us who…
Bitter Man
I seem to be hating a lot of things recently. I’ve always been mature for my age, so I think at 30 I may have started to cross over into crotchety old man territory. If I had a lawn and…
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…