Articles on game design in general.
“I’ve always equated ‘feelings’ with ‘getting caught’ they both get in the way of my money. Unfortunately not everyone is as committed to their work as I am.” Garrett isn’t an embodiment of traditional power fantasies, he might save the world but he does it reluctantly, accidentally. By the time he actively decides to foil […]
“Don’t get any funny ideas.” I like Halo: Combat Evolved. In any list of my personal favourite titles it would be up there with Midwinter II: Flames Of Freedom and Thief II: The Metal Age. Each of the Halo sequels have been entertaining but none had the same impact, nor felt as pure in their execution […]
The request of The Omar, the cyborg black marketeers of Deus Ex: Invisible War, is made when you throw something at them, repeatedly. It’s a little strange to hear this retort each and every time you throw a lamp, or cup at their heads but if you are constantly bombarding them with junk and getting the same […]
One of the first things you see upon setting foot in Rapture is a Vita-Chamber. No matter how many times you are killed, you are always “reborn” at the closest Vita-Chamber free to continue from where you left off. There are benefits to this approach, but also some validity to the criticism that overly explicitly encourages […]
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 […]
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 […]