Last night an old friend of my brother’s came by and hooked up his machine to play games with my brother and me. We played Starcraft, Sins of a Solar Empire, and Battlefield 1942. There were stores of Coke and chips and Twizzlers, and the basement room in which we were arrayed heated up by [...]
Last night my team, the Detroit Red Wings, finally bested the upstart Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 6 to win the Stanley Cup and their fourth championship in eleven seasons. I have been an ardent Detroit fan since I lived there as a child and witnessed their back-to-back sweep of the championship in ‘97 and ‘98, [...]
My brother recently graduated from college with a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics. After spending the summer with me working theater in New Hampshire, he’ll be heading to sub-Saharan Africa to teach science for the Peace Corps for two years. When he returns, he plans to enter graduate school in Edinburgh in [...]
One of the things I find most attractive about game design is the need for true multi-disciplinary thinking. A diverse mind engaged in diverse pursuits is a far more fertile designer than one that is focused, however nimble or learned that mind may be. Game designers create whole universes, and no mere education in digital [...]
I have occasionally thought that pursuing an advanced degree is a bit like playing a game… a massive, cumbersome, complex game. Maybe that’s a sign I think about games too much Recently, I had a rude awakening regarding the structure of this game I’m playing: they changed the rules on me. Rather, the rules [...]
“It’s not a mistake, it’s an iteration. I’m a game designer — everything I say is a prototype.”
- Brenda Brathwaite
The other day I gave a lecture on the importance of criticism in game design, and I drew a parallel to ideas from my undergraduate study in philosophy. One of the tenets of Western philosophy is the idea of debate and defensibility as proof of merit. Simply put, philosophers debate ideas because they hold that [...]
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 [...]
Hot on the heels of a most successful conference were the awards for Entelechy, SCAD’s annual interactive design and game development departmental showcase and competition. It is open to all students at SCAD to submit their best work in a variety of categories, including: digital game, character modeling, concept art, environment/level design, paper/board game, card [...]
An unusual group project I worked on last quarter produced an interesting board game, and today the postmortem goes up on GameCareerGuide. This is the second postmortem I have written for GCG — the first was for Cowboy Cave, and if you read the two you’ll notice more than a little difference in the described [...]