Having now read Patrick Redding’s Austin Game Developers Conference presentation (“Familiarity Breeds Contempt: Building Game Stories That Flow”) it’s interesting to see how dissimilar our thinking is on the matters of flow and story. It seems Patrick believes the role of the story is to help with flow itself, something that serves liable to make the story […]
Note: This was originally written as response to some elements of Clint’s presentation, before I got stuck on the notion of logical immersion as flow and from there the concept of story flow. Maybe if I’d been paying more attention I’d have read Pat Redding’s presentation before I made this post. As it is I’ll be […]
Despite a history of decidedly average game to film translations, I believe there are some properties that could successfully make the transition, provided they were treated in a manner appropriate to the subject matter. At the risk of being branded a heretic I believe that System Shock 2 is such a title that has interesting film potential. […]
Rescue or Harvest? Harvest or Rescue? In the end, it doesn’t matter which choice you make. Rescue the Little Sisters and lead them out into the world to live, and learn, and love; or harvest them for their Adam and use it to make Rapture a nuclear power. Either way in order to reach that […]
I’ve just finished Tron 2.0 and I feel one particular aspect is worthy of a specific mention. That is the ending, or more specifically the final level and concluding cut-scene. I can appreciate the logic of ending the story in such a way as to invite a sequel, I might not personally enjoy such conclusions […]
On his blog BioShock 2 designer Steve Gaynor has posted a Call To Arms in which he encouraged designers to submit designs that evoke a feeling or conflict not typically expressed in existing games. Here is my submission, tentatively entitled “Friends Like These”. Friends Like These represents the player as a blob, constantly traveling onwards […]
A core property of games as is that of interactivity, digital games especially so. Computers are interactive, therefore computer games are interactive, but does interactivity operate on a binary scale? Is something either interactive or not? If it’s not a binary scale does a game require a certain degree of interactivity? One title that has been criticised for […]
To those people who don’t play games on a PC, the PC is a device for spreadsheets, word processing and the internet. You use the mouse to select things, click on links and open files. Those functions are all related to work. There’s some validity to the idea that PC gaming works because all the […]
I was in the bar last night watching somebody playing on a fruit machine. There were the typical revolving reels with various images on them, though instead of just showing the three front symbols the machine displayed a grid of nine. From what I was able to ascertain you could win not only on rows, but also on the diagonals and through various other combinations […]
I’ve often found myself in discussions regarding the apparent mainstreaming of games, the basic argument being that games will lose some of what initially made them special because they are now being designed for a wider audience. Whilst this is a point of view I can understand, it is also one that I consider a little […]