Click Nothing
design from a long time ago
recent posts
I’m one of the author’s in the 2022 opdc (didn’t win anything, still trying to bear up under the shame…
Been waiting for this one for a while! Nice to see you back
cool, looking forward to it!
Thank you for this very interesting collection, and for wrestling with the obviously mixed feelings on this anniversary. And thank…
Category: Games
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A few years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the release of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, I posted some thoughts about the development of that game, and the impact it had on my life. Specifically I talked a bit about how the intense stress and long hours on that project affected me. In a follow-up…
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Maybe you’ve been vacationing on Pitcairn Island since the beginning of April and you haven’t gotten news yet, but a month or so ago millions of documents were leaked to the press from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama. These papers reveal how hundreds, or potentially thousands of wealthy individuals have been using offshore…
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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…
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A few months ago I was honored to be invited by Reid McCarter (@reidmccarter) and Patrick Lindsey (@HanFreakinSolo) to contribute the foreward to an anthology they were editing called Shooter. It's a collection of essays about first-person shooters and their place and relevance within the larger context of media and culture. The fifteen chapters are contributed…
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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…
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I realized earlier today that it’s been ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped. Obviously, a lot has changed in that time, but I’m not going to wax nostalgic about that. I thought instead I would regale you a never before made public tale of what that game meant to me. Chaos Theory was…
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I just came across the news (also) that Douglas E Smith, the creator of Lode Runner passed away last week. Lode Runner was a pretty formative game for me and not simply because I played it a lot. It contributed to my design thinking in a really profound way. I wrote about it indirectly for Edge…
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There’s been a lot of water under the bridge in the eight and a half years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped back in 2005. We’ve seen the sunset of an entire console generation, and we are about to sunset another. Three major titles have shipped in the series, the most recent of which effectively…
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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…
Click Nothing 
This is still an interesting read. But for me it was far simpler than this: The game’s narrative tries to…