Select Page

What He's Told

I don’t know Justin Marks, but someone retweeted this thought of his into my stream this morning: Difference between a video game hero and movie hero: a vidgame hero is expected to do what he’s told – a movie hero is supposed to defy it. We...

Battle Beats

Sarah Darkmagic has written a great post at Critical Hits, “Hope and Fear,” about how to use Hamlet’s Hit Points story beats inside an unfolding combat. She talks about specific mechanical elements of Dungeons & Dragons, but her thinking is more...

Battle Beats

Sarah Darkmagic has written a great post at Critical Hits, “Hope and Fear,” about how to use Hamlet’s Hit Points story beats inside an unfolding combat. She talks about specific mechanical elements of Dungeons & Dragons, but her thinking is more...

Ryan Macklin on Story vs. Adventure Games

I missed this one when he posted it, but back in July Ryan Macklin wrote a blog post that talks about the difference between “adventure games” and “story games.” Whether one is enamored of that particular pair of labels or not, I think...

Subtext in Game Texts

A question came in via my personal Tumblr blog that I thought you might be interested in. For sure, I think it deserves some of your attention, so I’m addressing it here. That question: Q: If games have texts (the rule books and source material), then they have...