Click Nothing

design from a long time ago

recent posts

  1. Sven's avatar
  2. Unknown's avatar

    I’m one of the author’s in the 2022 opdc (didn’t win anything, still trying to bear up under the shame…

  3. Arya's avatar
  4. Max Clark's avatar
  5. Kfix's avatar

    Thank you for this very interesting collection, and for wrestling with the obviously mixed feelings on this anniversary. And thank…

Category: Design Theory

  • GDC – Part III – Third Best

    So, I wanted to post some thoughts about my favorite GDC sessions and comment on some of the takeway. Unfortunately, this was such an excellent GDC, and I tend to post huge tracts anyway, that I think I had best not do it all in one post. There are six sessions I wanna talk about…

  • GDC – Part II – Exploration

    The slides and the accompanying paper for my GDC presentation are up for anyone interested. There were three questions people asked after the presentation that I think really contributed to the talk and enhanced even my own understanding of the topic (there were other very good questions too, but these three were the ones I…

  • GDC – Part I – San Francisco

    Just got out of bed from a nap after my red-eye back from San Francisco and thought I’d fire up my first few thoughts about GDC this year. I’ll probably do a few posts about GDC in the coming days, as well as find a chance to put up the slides for my talk, though…

  • L’exploration

    So I had the opportunity to do a kind of trial run of my GDC presentation for the local Montreal IGDA Chapter last week. While I wasn’t super happy with it, it was really just a first draft, and I’ve been working on it on and off since. Should have a much better version in…

  • I Stand Corrected – partly

    Just yesterday I blogged that Patrick Dugan had provided a very insightful critique/analysis of the game Ayiti: The Cost of Life, and I complained that it was "a shame more games are not reviewed or critiqued with such insight". Next thing you know, Jurie, over at Intelligent-Artifice points to Ian Bogost’s brilliant critique of Bully,…

  • I Explore

    Sweet. My GDC 2007 presentation got accepted. It’s about exploration in games. Different kinds of it, how it works, what draws players into exploring, how to design to support it, and how to leverage it to broaden the expressive space of your game. This should be a challenging one. One of the things I love…

  • #$%& Fun

    How the hell did I miss this? A year or so ago it started to dawn on me that there were problems with the notion of fun. At first, I started ot think that maybe ‘fun’ was merely a formal quality of games – the same way rhyme and meter were formal qualities of poetry.…

  • Three Curvy Lines and the Truth

    Line Rider has been floating around the office lately – many offices I assume – and I finally mucked around with it for a while today. It’s wicked fun for some oddly perverse reason, and looking at YouTube, it seems like a load of other people have found it mesmerizing and strangely addictive to boot.…

  • Futureplay and Toronto

    Just got back from the Futureplay 2006 conference in London, Ontario yesterday, where I got to give my first ever keynote. That was pretty exciting. The other keynote speakers were Justin Roche, Sheri Graner Ray, Don Daglow, and Ken Perlin, so very flattering to be among that roster. I gave the same presentation the following…

  • Portrait of an Architect as and Old Man: Part Three

    Another thing that struck me about Pollack’s The Sketches of Frank Gehry (which is now available on DVD for those interested), was a scene where Gehry recalls, years previously, having asked Pollack how he managed to deal with working in a creative field with such strong commercial constraints. Pollack’s answer (in the perspective of his…