“To serve the nobility is the highest privilege in life of course but slavery is just so… distasteful.” Annotated Walkthrough, 6: Without the option to read the books sitting upon the shelves there is little to determine if the library of Angelwatch was created to serve a functional purpose or whether it exists merely as […]
Tag: Game Design
Categories
A Shattered Goddess
“… Rapture’s genius will be held within her new DNA, able to shift into desired patterns at will. A Utopian cannot be confined to a single throw of the genetic dice. When needed, she is a composer. A dancer. An engineer. She truly will be the People’s Daughter.” System Shock 2 is SHODAN’s story, your […]
Categories
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 […]
Categories
Two steps forward…
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 […]
Categories
The Perma-death interview.
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 […]
Categories
Multi-level decision making.
At any moment during a game players are liable to be thinking about events in multiple timeframes at once. Performing tasks that are over in seconds, in order to achieve goals that are over in minutes as a means of completing missions that may take hours. The lowest level of actions occur on the Immediate layer, these […]
Categories
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 […]
Categories
Who are you?
Who is Gordon Freeman? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The elements of his character that can be said to be fixed, are insubstantial and provide little that is definitive. In reality there are a hundred thousand Gordon Freemans, a million. Each person who plays Half-Life has a subtly different interpretation of who […]
Categories
Continuous Meaning.
As has been discussed previously it makes no sense to analyse a game mechanic devoid of the context in which it occurs. At an abstract level Jump is a mechanic that exists in many games from Super Mario Galaxy to Mirror’s Edge or Far Cry 2. The context within which each mechanic is performed is what […]
Categories
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 […]