“And now you come swanning into my neighbourhood looking for me? Wrong turn, tin daddy.” This first instalment of Groping The Map will be presented in multiple parts, running over the next several weeks: Introduction. Annotated Walkthrough, 1: Diner and Downtown. Annotated Walkthrough, 2: Market. Annotated Walkthrough, 3: Sinclair Deluxe. Combat in The Drop: Encounter […]
Tag: BioShock
Next week witnesses the beginning of a new phase for this site. Starting Monday evening (GMT) Groping The Map is a series of in depth examinations of a single level. Each new instalment will see me take a detailed look at a game level from the past several years that has been personally memorable or […]
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Territorial Control.
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 […]
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Meaningful Actions.
I like Chess, I would even go as far as to say I think it is a mechanically perfect game. The strength of Chess is that there are no redundant actions, there are no actions without consequences. Achieving a checkmate is not only dependant on the final move but on every preceding move, right back to […]
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The Play Experience.
A fair criticism of my work is that I have a tendency to adopt a fragmentary approach to examinations of game mechanics. I’ve examined specific elements of a game in isolation, ignoring important mechanics and interactions in order to aid clarity. The obvious problem with this approach is that a game is a complex system […]
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Exploring Meaning.
In order to consider and analyse the explorative form of games it is necessary to present the game mechanics, the logical game space, in some visual manner. The interconnected nature of objects and actions, nouns and verbs, within a game can make any attempt at a complete representation of the entire possibility space prohibitively complex; therefore some […]
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Mechanical Exploration.
Warning: This post contains mechanical spoilers for Gravity Bone. If you don’t believe that’s possible and have yet to play the game I assume no responsibility… In the comments to my previous article on the difference between literature, film and games, Chade questioned my use of the term explorative to describe games. He made two […]
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What a Waste.
There comes a moment in Fallout 3 where, standing staring around at the skeletal trees and blasted earth, you realise all the mounds of rock you’ve been climbing over were once buildings; offices, apartment blocks maybe even shops and schools. In that moment you can see in your mind what that alternate history version of Washington D.C. might […]
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Exploring the Territory.
Games are about the exploration of space, both in the physical sense of exploring a virtual environment, and the abstract sense of exploring the possibility space provided by the game; the mechanics available and the dynamics that develop from them. In both cases there are two distinct types of explorable territory: functional and logical. The […]
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Sea of Dreams.
The (dead) cat is out of the underwater city it seems, the first teaser trailer for BioShock 2 (Possible full title BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams), available as bonus content on the Playstation 3 release of BioShock, has found its way online; as such things always do. I’ve mentioned BioShock numerous times on this site, […]