We just watched a snippet from a Discovery series on the human body, about sight and the ways in which the mind filters out noise and extraneous detail to present you an extremely narrow packet of information about the world in front of your face. It included a scene in which the host demonstrates a […]
The other night I attended a birthday party involving the oh-so-American phenomenon midnight bowling. A number of my friends were in attendance, many of them as couples. Midnight bowling is really a drinking-game version of regular bowling, so by the time the second game began people were fairly wobbly, and their feelings and attitudes towards […]
I recently acquired this game by pure luck from a local game store. I consider it lucky because, two years ago at GenCon ‘06, I had the opportunity to play the game in its first public appearance. The creators themselves were at GenCon to debut the game (as is the custom among American non-digital game […]
I realize this story has been on the net for some time now, but I only recently became aware of it when it showed up on Play This Thing. I was so furious I was literally shouting at my computer. How can people persist in being so willfully ignorant and obtuse? “Free speech can only […]
What is the source of the unique holding power of games? The April Fool’s Day jokes came and went this year, and from the WoW Bard class a la Guitar Hero to the Zelda movie, they were pretty fun. But watching people drool over the Zelda trailer, and then watching them wail in despair when […]
Yesterday, in my role as Teaching Assistant to Brenda for this quarter’s section of Game Design Criticism & Analysis, I supervised a student play session of Carcassonne. I noticed some interesting dynamics emerge between the players…
While not a trading game, Carcassonne incorporates a fair amount of diplomacy and interplayer negotiation. The tiles are the core […]
The other day I was present during a workshop in one of Brenda’s courses, in which students have to design a game using six object selected from the aptly-named “Box of Crap:” a largely random collection of dice, toys, and miscellaneous junk on the order of the sort you’d find in a vending machine or […]
I’ve just finished reading an excellent history on one of my favorite subjects: tall ship history and combat. This particular work chronicles the ships, sailors, engagements, and politics of the War of 1812 — the last great naval war in the age of fighting sail (Bonaparte fell for good in 1815, steamships were on the […]
[Republished from my thesis blog. See the previous example for more info.]
One possibility I have considered for the enactment of my game is placing players in the position of the evildoer.
I mentioned in a previous post the McDonald’s Flash game, in which players play as corporate magnates shepherding a simplified McDonalds corporation. The objective […]
A number of recent events — my 13th game design and it’s response, a post by Yehuda, and some first-hand play experience — have led me to reflect on the idea of cooperative games: specifically, games that feature all players acting together against the game itself.
All games are competitive in some way, even the conceptual […]