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 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”…
A game is a collection of symbols and rules for how those symbols can interact with one another. I described these as being obstacles and tools, one of which defines the parameters of success and the other of which are…
As someone who likes games, I find the vocabulary that people use to describe games that they didn’t like, or that they found frustrating and infuriating, quite interesting. When you describe a game as mean-spirited, unfair, or disrespectful of your…
I’ve recently seen people complaining about the (admittedly trite) fiction writer statement about how a character’s behavior can come seemingly out of nowhere, like they’re coming to life and acting out a will of their own, completely taking the writer…
The discussion of what’s fun and interesting in games is necessarily also a discussion of what’s boring and tedious. Finding the points where a design begins to work against itself, begins to push the player down paths of rote task…
Sometime within the past 15 years or so, game developers collectively came to the realization that death sucks. They reacted to this by making games easier, by reducing the consequence for failure, by allowing the player to quickly get back…
Is luck fun? Games, and those who play them, have a somewhat tense and delicate relationship with luck and randomness. In the best case, adding some randomness to a game can create unexpected and delightful variations on the basic challenge…
There is a process which repeats, a cycle with no end in sight. As my skill grows, my ability to recognize my own flaws grows with it, and thus, from my perspective, it appears that I’m not growing more skillful…
The line between playing games and watching them has been blurred once more, in a rather interesting way, by the huge success of Twitch Plays Pokemon. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Twitch Plays Pokemon is an event which…
