Articles on game design in general.
“The closed door is a curious object. Secures a world inside or ensures one stays out. Harbinger of fear and joy in equal measure. Barrier both physical and mental requiring an act of will to remove. It keeps the sad isolated and the joyous together. Humble custodian, both guardian and jailer. There is little more […]
“There comes a point where you start to wonder why you never gave it any serious thought before. You’re a smart guy and you could be making ten times what you do now. You’d have to break the law but really how big a deal is that in this country? You could do it without […]
“What happened to that nice young girl you brought home last year..?” “She was not a young girl mother, she was only two years younger than me.” “And you’re still my little girl. Now don’t avoid the question. She was lovely and she had a thing for you anyone could see that.” “… It wasn’t […]
“This is the kind of case that makes you want to believe in true evil, to believe that only someone who’s honest to God evil could do something like that. But that’s not how it is, is it? He’s not evil, being evil would make him special but there’s nothing special about him, he’s just […]
“It hits you like a shock wave; that moment when you realise exactly where your friendship ends. Sure you have disagreements, who doesn’t? But this is different. Worse is you see he doesn’t even realise what’s happened. This burning mark seared into you friendship and he can’t even see that it’s him holding the brand. […]
Having previously examined the possibly meanings that can be drawn from logical exploration, in the form of resource cycles in BioShock and Beyond Good & Evil, I’ve decided to take a step back and look more closely at the concept of exploration in a territorial sense. What meaning can this form of exploration impart? I […]
Stripped of all context there is a single ability true to all video games: amplification of input, the translation of a simple input into a complex output: I press this button and a whole new range of options become available to me; I pull this trigger and that car explodes. The idea is not to […]
The appeal of Nathan Drake is that he is a decisive character. He might be flawed, imperfect and not always able to make the best decisions yet he will always make a decision. He doesn’t hesitate, he acts, often with little understanding of the full consequences of his actions but still with an appreciation of […]
With each consecutive hardware generation it takes time to achieve what was possible at the end of the previous generation. New hardware requires new software techniques and often a return to first principles. The initial move from sprite based to polygon based games saw a marked increase in the spatial complexity of environments but was […]
A large part of what fascinates me about games is the subjective nature of the play experience itself, the notion that no two people will have the same experience even within a heavily scripted game. Recently Australian blogger Ben Abraham has been gaining attention for his decision to partake in an “iron man” play through […]