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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: Game Industry

  • Make Good Games Well

    A month or so ago I gave a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit – it's the first public talk I've given in some time. Since it was a keynote, I stayed pretty high level, and didn't really give the usual hardcore top-to-bottom design talk. This talk – about the manufacture of chocolate, wine and…

  • Anti-Irreplaceable

    Wow. Over ten percent of all the traffic that has ever gone through this blog went through in the past week in response to my previous post about Chaos Theory. Needless to say, that was totally unexpected. I realized sometime in the evening last Saturday that it was Chaos Theory's 10 year Anniversary and decided…

  • IFOG Symposium

    Last week I was able to attend UCSC's Inventing the Future of games Symposium in Mountainview. Overall, I foudn the conference to be super interesting as it brought together a diverse range people who are working on the problems of dynamic narratives using a wide range of approaches. I gave a short presentation (slides and…

  • Why Are We Here

    Tomorrow night the Smithsonian's travelling Art of Video Games Exhibit opens at the EMP Museum here in Seattle. To celebrate the opening of the exhibit, the EMP is hosting the Game Night event which will feature lots of gaming, as well as talks from seven different game developers talking about different a range of different…

  • First We Take Manhattan…

    A couple weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece about Fumito Ueda, and his games Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a good piece, and one that I am extremely happy to see running in such a prestigious publication with an audience broader than the audience for most writing-about-games. The piece quotes me…

  • [REDACTED] The Dominant Cultural Form of the 21st Century

    Recently I was in an email discussion with some friends and colleagues (who will ironically go unnamed here) about the whole ‘game designers getting their name on the box’ debate. Putting the two related (but different) issues of credit standards and the absurdity of boxes themselves aside for another time, I want to talk about…

  • I <3 Japan

    I can't imagine that it is even possible that anyone who would end up on my blog would not have already been aware of this. Gamers Heart Japan is an initiative launched by Victor Lucas and Electric Playground to help raise money to support the Red Cross relief effort in Japan. I'm honored that Victor…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Eight: Future Past Seven months ago when I started writing this column, I suspected the things I would be talking about were mostly wishful thinking. The idea that an increasingly entrenched game industry would see value in connecting casual, social or mobile gamers to their blockbuster AAA titles through meaningful gameplay seemed likely to…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Seven: Agency Beyond the Magic Circle For the past six months, I have been writing about ways to build connections between different games, and by extension, their audiences. I've imagined fashion design games for portable platforms that feed clothing designs to open world games where avatar clothing customization matters. I've imagined social world building…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Six: Platform Jumping For the last five parts of this series I talked around the issue of Single Player games and their place in the intramedia landscape I have been describing. I've looked at how social world building games like Farmville might seed content into SP game worlds. I've looked at how mobile apps…