When I first wrote about the online social deception game community I joined, I mentioned my failed attempts to get my hands on game development documents for pedagogical purposes. When I began to play mafia with this group, and to learn more about how the community functioned, my project was […]
Design and Development
106 posts
The trajectory of the Dishonored series is a fascinating one. In the original game, players took on the role of Corvo Attano, while in the associated DLCs, the playable center shifted to the assassin Daud. The sequel then offered players the choice of Corvo or his daughter Emily. Now, with Death […]
Consentacle is a card game created by Naomi Clark that focuses on trust, intimacy, and communication between two players. It’s currently live on Kickstarter and at the time of writing is more than 100% funded. The game has been floating around in prototype form for a couple of years and […]
Episode 156 Pizza Party is the Best Party…Oh, and Our Video Game Summer Run Down (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we chat about what we’ve been playing this summer and what we are going to be playing to close the […]
The concept of nostalgia is a huge one for Nazis these days. They seem to all want to make America great “again” as if it has ever been so great for those of us spend our days fighting oppression of one sort or another (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) or just […]
So if you’re surprised I’m writing about the State of Decay 2 footage shown at E3, you don’t know me at all. I didn’t watch the Microsoft show live, and to be honest, I watched most of it at 2x or 4x speed, which I recommend for the amazing faces and […]
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that the idea of games seeking to tell stories is an […]
Last week, Austin Walker wrote about endings over at Waypoint, focusing not only on literal game endings, but also on letting go. Preparing to return to the world can be a challenge, certainly; I’ve never come back from Trumbull Valley, for instance. But sometimes it’s all too easy to leave […]
I spent a lot of time looking at diversity in State of Decay and its re-release, from actually counting and coding bodies to considering the feeling of a game driven by the kinds of characters who don’t normally lead stories. Results were mixed; the game, while much stronger than many […]
We got an e-mail last week about good games with troubling elements — so, basically, all games. But the question was: how do we choose the right way to handle games with problems? We have to play the games to understand them, and we want to support devs who are […]
Many games, particularly smaller indie games, present limited experience, and these limitations can manifest in myriad ways. Firewatch takes place over a single summer. Depression Quest is all text, with text options denied as its driving mechanic. Reigns is a series of yes/no decisions. Some games, though, ask you to […]
The following article may contain spoilers for Final Fantasy XV and its surrounding universe. So Final Fantasy XV came out last week. Honestly, by now, it should be no mystery that I’m probably one of the least excited people in the world about that. Though I tried to keep my […]
Last week, a friend mentioned the recently released film The Girl With All the Gifts, and its associated book. I’d never heard of either, but it’s no surprise to anyone around here that I’m a huge zombie nerd, so the trailer immediately caught my attention, because it’s a human story […]
As we’ve talked about on the podcast, Sam and I have both been reading Katherine Isbister’s How Games Move Us, but while she’s been open chatty, I’ve been reserving my thoughts. For me, there’s a lot to wrestle with, because the book directly engages with a lot of ideas I’ve […]
Last weekend, the two of us played Bound (Plastic Demoscene Group), a game released last month that makes use of surreal landscapes and surreal storytelling. And its surreality and fluid fragmentation seem to work to construct a narrative and world that shifts and changes, that asks us to constantly question the […]
One thing that critics like myself don’t do nearly enough is nod to just how difficult it is to be a game creator. Every game is flawed. Every game designer is flawed. It is easy to pick something out after a game is released and say you would have done […]