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: Games

  • 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…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Three: If you build it, they will come. Ever since I can remember, I have loved using level editors. I got my start before I was even a teenager building Lode Runner levels on the Vic 20, by my mid twenties I was making levels in UnrealEd to play with friends, and my first…

  • Agency: Past, Present, Future.

    I don't want to make ClickNothing a clearing house of second run stuff I am writing for print magazines, and I still want to make sure I get original content up here. I'm working on some stuff, but am also pretty busy. Part of the reason I decided to take these writing opportunities with Edge…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part Two: The Emperor's New Clothes Imagine for a moment an alternate reality where racing games suck. Here, racing games only exist on portable devices. And they don't ever let you actually race. You have a couple dozen car models, and a few different engines. You can swap out tires and spoilers, choose from a…

  • Convergence Culture

    Part One: The Vampires of Culture From a design perspective, 'convergence' is a dirty word. Convergence is a business concept that aims to bring about an overlap in otherwise diverse audiences by leveraging IP across games, film, toys, books and comics, television or other forms of entertainment. In the game industry, the traditional approach to…

  • Didacticism in Game Design

    There is a trend in game development that has been growing a head of steam over the last couple years, and I have some concerns about it. The trend is in support of the notion that game developers need to somehow demonstrate the maturity of their medium and of their own creative capabilities by making…

  • On Auteurship in Games

    So this Friday just past, the latest New York Times Magazine ran a piece about the rising 'indie movement' in game development. It's a good piece – providing what I feel is an accessable overview of the current state of the games/art discussion and the rising importance of the indie scene and what these developers…

  • Click Nothing Tour 2009 – Part II

    In the beginning, there was nothing It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009. It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days. The talk, as detailed in a previous post,…

  • Click Nothing Tour 2009 – Part I

    So for those who missed it in the microsecond that it flew past on Twitter, I will be keynoting the GameX Industry Summit conference taking place in Philadelphia on Oct 24-25. Here are the working title and summary of the talk I plan to give: The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New…

  • Live and Let Die

    So, what started as an experiment by Ben over at Sometimes Life Requires Consequence is starting to pick up steam. It's been tagged a couple times now at Game Set Watch and Kieron Gillen over at Rock Paper Shotgun blasted some buckshot his way in today's Sunday Papers. Already at least a couple other players…