by Jeff Tidball | Feb 24, 2010 | Business, Design, Video Games
Brian Ashcraft has written some smart analysis comparing and contrasting film auteur-ship with video game auteur-ship. He eventually decides: In game development, because the studio is so important and because the team is so important and because there are so many...
by Will Hindmarch | Feb 23, 2010 | Board Games, card games, Fan Culture, Question, RPGs, Video Games
This past weekend, Adam Jury wrote about a gamer he met who isn’t plugged in to the larger network. On Monday nights, I play with some gamers who are only loosely plugged in beyond their one weekly play session. Even I’m not plugged in like I used to be —...
by Jeff Tidball | Feb 18, 2010 | Story, Video Games
Evan Narcisse wonders why there aren’t any good video games that are also good allegories: I don’t think it’s a big stretch to look to pop culture as a source of allegory. After all, the myths that we now study in college were originally everyday...
by Will Hindmarch | Feb 5, 2010 | Board Games, Design, MMOs, Movies, RPGs, Video Games, Websites, Writing
Here’s something I wrote about games as art, eons ago, when somebody on the Internet made me all mad. Someday I may finish it, and update its bunch of busted links, but for now I offer it up in rough form, in honor of the Art History of Games (#AHoG), happening...
by Will Hindmarch | Dec 18, 2009 | Design, RPGs, Story, Video Games
Jordan Mechner is among my favorite game designers, not least because I dig the way he integrates stories into gameplay. I played the original Prince of Persia and the later reinvention, The Sands of Time, over and over again, sometimes to sample the story again and...
by Jeff Tidball | Dec 8, 2009 | Design, Video Games
I’ve been playing Drop7 on my iPhone. It’s a game that its developer, Area/Code, describes as “Tetris meet Sudoku.” You blow up numbered circles by dropping them to make contiguous rows or columns of circles equal to the number. Blowed-up...
