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

  • 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 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…

  • Ethical Decision Making

    Manveer over at Design Rampage threw up his Pecha Kucha style slides, notes and audio from his GLS talk about Ethical Decision Making in games. He makes more or less the same points that I made in a similar talk back in 2004, linked here as well as in the stack on the right. PK…

  • GDC09 – Part 3 – Wines and Rants

    The last set of slides I have to put up are those for my five minute talk about game rating systems that I gave as part of Richard Lemarchand's Microtalks session on Thursday morning. Overall I really enjoyed the session – though the prep was a nightmare. I guess it's pretty easy to enjoy a session where…

  • GDC09 – Part 1 – GDW and Family Dynamics

    Here begins my long slow recap of GDC wherein I will ultimately get around to posting all of my various slides and presentation materials, as well as different commentary on the sessions I saw and what I thought was valuable about GDC this year. First up is my quick recap of the Game Design Workshop…

  • Choice and Consequence

    Randy is so frikkin' smart. His latest column on Next-Gen dot biz is right on. In particular, I really appreciate this concise statement of one of the big challenges we face today as game designers: Modern games, by contrast, teach us things like it doesn’t really matter which way you choose to go. That someone will always…

  • Here’s lookin’ at you – algorithm…

    Two interesting links floated around work in the last couple days. Both related to visualizations of information or information processes. One was this beautiful work being done by Alex Dragulescu at MIT Media Lab where he is feeding patterns from software viruses into 3D software to create visual representations of what they ‘look like’… and…

  • A Teacher’s Primer

    Middle of last week, The Globe and Mail published an interesting and well-written article about the Canadian Teacher’s Federation (ironically abbreviated ‘CTF‘) calling for a ban on the X360 and Wii release of Rockstar’s Bully: Scholarship Edition. Before getting into it I want to praise the unbiased and seemingly well-informed writing of the article itself…

  • GDC 2008 – Part Two – Game Design Workshop

    So this year Mark Leblanc invited me to join the faculty of the Game Design Workshop. The GDW is the 2-day Tutorial that runs on the Monday and Tuesday prior to ‘GDC-proper’ where we conduct a series of design excercises to familiarize designers (or anyone) with important design concepts like paper prototyping, fast iteration, and…