Sword and Shield
The power of empathy is an idea that is simultaneously talked about way too much while hardly being understood at all. There’s two things that we get wrong when we speak of using empathy to resolve conflict. We talk about…
Tag Politics
Balancing in the Middle
For a while there was a trend of providing a moral choice to players: The choice between Good and Evil. My understanding is that this idea probably started with Ultima IV in 1985 – but when I think about “moral…
Woven Wave
You can visualize every human who has ever existed as a node in space and time. We exist here and now, one in a vast array of faceted gems shining through space. We occupy orbital patterns, gravitate towards and away…
Rewriting The Ending
Nowadays, opportunities to express misanthropic and cynical viewpoints are thick on the ground – cruel and duplicitous politicians who still bafflingly find true believers, fantastical and murderous conspiracy theories, betrayals and close-mindedness, callousness and cruelty everywhere. It makes so much…
Sleep Paralysis
I still like the film Inception. This is not an unusual opinion, it was a huge blockbuster hit, but in general the film seems to have diminished somewhat in the public estimation in the decade since its release. Many of…
Letting Go
I have a hard time letting go. Sometimes one gets haunted by the past not because it’s haunting but merely because it is past. Memories cling, like getting a song stuck in your head except it’s just a moment, a…
Criminal
Big things are happening. The sheer cruelty of the systems that drive the world have been laid bare, and right now people are trying to see if they’re going to find a way to somehow sweep the blood under the…
Systems
Game design is the art of building systems to generate an expressive and aesthetically interesting output. Challenge is often implied, but isn’t a necessary trait of these systems – usually challenge is the product of stated or implied rules of…
Power
This is the story of power. In the beginning, there is the community. At first there’s no real differentiation between members, each doing whatever work seems to need to be done as it occurs to them to do it. One…
Plagued
Well, it seems as though we’re going to be stuck inside for a while. The situation is pretty scary, but moment-to-moment this frankly doesn’t represent much of a change in my life. However, like the clouds of smoke that wash…