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 […]
My entry for this weeks Game Design Challenge, conceived by James Portnow and hosted on the Game Career Guide. View the full description of this week’s challenge - “Design a WWII shooter.”
WWII Game – Croix de Lorraine
Selling points:
Bold new perspective on the conflict
Rich urban environments
Unique guerilla missions and level design
Strong female protagonist!
The game takes […]
I saw this post on King Lud IC and the link to this article about Chinese MMO ZT Online, now infamous for its monetization scheme and systematic player exploitation. This is truly something incredible. Reading the story of Lu Yang and her journey into the underworld that is ZT Online’s digital economy is like reading […]
I played WoW again the other day — it’s been nearly three years to the week that I stopped playing the first time around. I was only under the influence for about fourteen months, not counting the summertime when I didn’t have my computer. I’ve been told by many friends that the game is vastly […]
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 […]
A point Tracy Fullerton made during the same panel discussion (see previous post): to be a media-maker is to participate in the making of culture.
An often-forgotten but penetrating insight, I believe. It needs no reiteration how much games have contributed to our culture and vice versa, and I’m not talking just about the subculture of […]
During the first session at GDX - a panel discussion with Tracy Fullerton, Greg Costikyan, Frank Lantz, and Eric Zimmerman - the moderator, Ian Bogost, made an interesting point during the debate over the question of the emerging indie scene. He commented that indie game developers seem to play two roles: the opposition and the […]
Today I head out for Atlanta to visit the SCAD campus there and attend GDX - the Game Developer’s Exchange, SCAD’s own micro-game developer conference. I very much enjoyed the conference last year — meeting interesting and unique people like Don Daglow, Marc Mencher, and Davey Jackson. This year we have an equally impressive crowd […]
The other day I finally completed my hard-fought, bloody conquest of the planet Kronus. While victory was always certain—merely a matter of time, and a question of in which order my enemies would perish—it was nonetheless a lengthy campaign and a fight worthy of the Emperor’s Finest. But by the time I had purged the […]
From GDC ‘08 Game Studies Download 3.0 (Jane McGonigal, Mia Consalvo, Ian Bogost), points #9 and #10 (thanks to Raph Koster for posting a summary on his blog; visit there to read his description):
#10: The best content understands exactly how the player likes to play and then makes it slightly harder.
#9: Breaking the immersive spell […]