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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. Max Clark's avatar
  4. Kfix's avatar

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

  5. KenTWOu's avatar

    I can’t remember that moment when I realized that you simultaneously was creative director, lead level designer and script writer…

Category: Games

  • Dynamics: the long and the short versions

    Last night was the opening night of the Art of Games exhibit at the EMP Museum, and along with several other great speakers from local the local industry, Valve co-worker Dave Kircher and I were there to give short talks about programming and design respectively. My talk, titled The Art of Games, Why Are We…

  • 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…

  • Trade Winds

    Emeric Thoa, founder and Creative Director of French indie studio The Game Bakers, (and former editorial conception manager on Far Cry 2) put up a pretty interesting analysis of how the Apple App Store generates income for developers, and how the financials seem to work out for different kinds of games – including his own…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Five: Gaming Across the Fifth Dimension Revolutionary ideas in science, technology and philosophy don’t exist in isolation in academic institutes, government think tanks, or corporate R&D labs, they touch all aspects of our culture. The ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin undercut millennia of oppression, giving rise to concepts like literacy, democracy and equality.…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Four: An offer that can't be refused Thought Experiment One: imagine Pong, tweaked to be more exciting. Instead of showing the AI paddle on the other side of the screen, we hide from the player everything that happens over the center line. An elegant pacing algorithm tracks the players returns and the score of…