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: Meaning

  • Dev Game Club Podcast Interview

    A few nights ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim and Brett at Dev Game Club after they had just spent the past five episodes of their podcast playing and talking about Far Cry 2. The series starts here, and the interview is the last one. I worked briefly alongside Tim at LucasArts,…

  • Video Games Are Better

    Having read Ian Bogost’s recent piece in The Atlantic several times now, I think I’ve managed to digest what he’s saying and figure out how I feel about it. First off, I feel the piece is trying to do too much. Bogost opens by eulogizing Maxis, and celebrating the studio’s impressive contribution to our medium,…

  • La Dissonance ludo-narrative

    (english follows) J'ai été contacté l'autre jour par quelque un en France qui a un blog sur le site GameKult. Lui a m'informer qu'il a tombé sur mon post de Bioshock et il avait aidé à articuler pour lui de quelques problemes qu'il avait avec le jeu. Il a décidé de traduire le post en…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Cost of Entry

    Damn. It's sure costing me a lot of money to leave this blog sitting here, doing nothing. I havent even had the time to get my GDC slides from 2011 up yet. I have wanted to go back and clean up the end of the talk, as the conclusion never really hung together the way…

  • 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.…

  • 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…