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 […]
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 […]
Arkham Asylum, or more formally the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, is not a pleasant place. It seems you are a nobody in Gotham City’s criminal fraternity unless you have spent some time there. Batman: Arkham Asylum draws influences from the various, often contradictory, sources of Gotham history to create a fully realised island […]
In the interests of pacing it’s not uncommon for action games, and first person shooters in particular, to vary the style of gameplay over the course of the game as a whole, and over the course of individual levels. This variation of gameplay style leads to a variation in the aesthetic experience of play, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Nearly twenty years ago Richard A. Bartle, co-creator of the first Multi User Dungeon (MUD) the precursor to the Massively Multiplayer Online Game, wrote an article entitled “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Player who suit MUDs”. Even today the classifications he set forth still hold true when examining the types of player who play World Of Warcraft […]
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 […]
Getting stuck in a game is far from uncommon. The specific reasons are as varied as the games themselves, though all such situations can generally be grouped into two categories; skill based obstacles or logic based obstacles. Common to action games, skill based obstacles stem from an inability to complete a given task. The goal is obvious, the […]