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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. 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: Narrative Design

  • Anti-Irreplaceable

    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…

  • Ten Years Down

    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…

  • 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,…

  • IFOG Symposium

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Full and Bright

    Two smart posts over at Steve Gaynor's blog, Fullbright. The first is his thoughts on 'storymaking'. I think it's a pretty good overview of the different levels at which the player is making his own story. I have a long comment (not approved as of this posting) that breaks down some of my own thoughts…

  • Pat’s Narrative Design Slides

    Pat Redding is the Narrative Designer on my project, and he gave a wicked talk at GDC about the narrative design of Far Cry 2. He has recently put his slides up for anyone interested, and they are annotated with the text of what he said, meaning they’re actually usable. This is must-have info for…

  • Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock

    The problem of what the game is about [traduit en francais ici] About a year ago, I praised Ian Bogost's critique of Bully and lamented the unfortunate lack of game criticism, as distinct from game reviews. Roughly speaking, we could say game criticism is for game developers and professionals who want to think about the…

  • Narrative and Flow

    Although I have not seen the presentation myself, nor had the chance to look at the slides and notes, Pat is back from Austin and he’s posted the materials from his talk. By all accounts it went well, hopefully we’ll find an hour when we’re not putting out fires (or starting them) so he can…