It has been a very long time since I posted a Sunday Poem. I am about to get on another airplane in the morning, so I am posting it a day early. This one’s bones came to me on a return flight from up the California coast, seeing the marine layer hovering at the edge [...]

I don’t have any tales of games saving me from depression. I mean, I did go through a period where I was depressed. I dropped out of high school while living overseas and basically just didn’t go anywhere. I slept for 23 hours straight. I woke up to eat something and read. It was listlessness, [...]

Remember back when I posted up that YouTube video of my first game? Well, that video was made for a panel at PAX East. The panelists have now launched a 1stGameEver Channel with more videos from other developers coming out regularly. First up? Will Wright. You can also catch video of the full panel at [...]

The call for submissions for GDC Next is now open. I am on the advisory board. The conference will be in Los Angeles, November 5-7. This is the conference that is replacing GDC Austin; basically, it’s intended to be the most forward-looking of the GDCs, intentionally looking at what comes next, not what happened in [...]

This video by Matthias Worch is superb, an explanation of the communication gap that was exposed so sharply by “A Letter to Leigh.” “Talking to the Player – How Cultural Currents Shape and Level Design” | You Got Red On You. In short, after seeing this, it feels like I have been arguing very much [...]

Yesterday Andrew Vanden Bossche posted a great article called The Tyranny of Choice in response to the formal questions about narrative that were in my post A Letter to Leigh. In the article, Andrew argues that every system by its very nature is a statement, not a dialogue. After all, if we artificially control the [...]

This past week I was on a panel at the Digital Media Wire LA Games Conference. The big thing that I wanted to get across to people attending is that many publishers are really caught in a bind. They aren’t willing to take on speculative projects, which is what smaller indies want and need. They [...]

The world is full of systems. Often they exist below the threshold of what we perceive. It’s all a whirling clockwork of near-infinite complexity, from the tiny mysteries of quantum physics to the wonder of a single tree spanning miles, to the vastness of neurons that sit inside our relatively small skulls. These systems are [...]

Well, sort of. I really mean “systemic game” and I am really talking only about game systems here. So let me preface this by saying that this article’s title is hyperbolic exaggeration. It uses the term “game” in my annoyingly formal, reductionist way. But I want to say it anyway, for the sake of the [...]

when people say games need objectives in order to be ‘games’, i wonder why ‘better understanding another human’ isn’t a valid ‘objective’ games need ‘challenges’ and ‘rules’, isn’t ‘empathy’ a challenge, aren’t preconceptions of normativity a ‘rule’ -  Leigh Alexander writing on Twitter Dear Leigh, I have such a complicated emotional response to this. And [...]

At PAX East, there was a panel where a bunch of devs talked about their first games. They asked me and a few others to send in a video… and this is what I sent them. The saga of how I managed to make it, though, is a little more intricate, involving copying all my [...]

As of today, I am an unemployed game developer! It was in the summer of 2006 that I founded Metaplace in a spare bedroom. By 2007, we had built an amazing, deeply involved community, and a powerful platform. By 2009, we had failed to make money at it and were forced to shut it down. [...]

I’ve always wanted a Wacom Cintiq: a tablet monitor, where you can draw directly on the glass screen at your desktop. I would enter the raffles at every GDC, hoping. I have used Tablet PCs for years now, but of course, that also means working on a laptop, which isn’t the same as having desktop [...]

Life with a new Windows 8 tablet. Oh boy, are there teething pains. Here’s some of what I did, located after insane amounts of Googling and multiple days. I am posting it here to save other people all the pain. An amazing resource: the forums at http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/ Gosh, the storage is limited. Yes, it is. [...]

Giant post ahead! Some background: I have been using Tablet PCs for a decade now. Back in the UO days, I always walked around with a paper notebook full of doodles, and I often sketch out design ideas as diagrams and quickie cartoons. With a pressure sensitive stylus I can also then do artwork directly [...]

Ah, the dread quick-time event. We may have to blame Shenmue for its wide adoption, though of course something like Dragon’s Lair used the same mechanic. They’re everywhere. They are one of the simplest game mechanics there is. And I have done my share of bashing on them too. What is a QTE and why do [...]

There have been two notable events lately as regards the portrayals of women in videogames. One is the launch of Anita Sarkeesian‘s video series on Tropes vs Women in Video Games, the first episode of which covers “damsels in distress.” You may recall Sarkeesian as the person who launched a Kickstarter for funds to make [...]

In the wake of what has been happening with SimCity 5, a lot of folks are asking what the future holds for single-player games that require an always-on connection. It’s not going to stop. The future is that Connectivity keeps getting better, which softens the blow for consumers. Developers find the sweet spot between “always [...]

The Devil Wears Prada game: Easy Mode A game about climbing the ladder at a fashion magazine. Lots of special event parties and lots of character customization Normal mode A game about attempting to edit a fashion magazine successfully — including taste-setting and photoshoots and budgets and ambitious editors Hard mode A game that teaches [...]

Hollywood just got done with its annual parade of self-congratulation. And I don’t mean that in a bad way — the Oscars may have originated as a marketing gimmick, but they are more than that. They serve as a way for creatives to honor creatives. And every year, movies are made which get called “Oscar [...]

I was just asked this on Quora, and thought I would crosspost my answer here. What makes people like specific genres of gaming (FPS, strategy, sports, racing etc)? What can you tell about people who like only a certain genre of gaming like Fps rather than strategy? Everyone starts out with different natural predispositions. For [...]

So, I have been working on the process to color all the cartoons in the revised Theory of Fun edition. I thought I might share some samples of the way it is looking so far. The original cartoons were done very quickly, which is why they were in such a rough, naif sort of style. [...]

I put this together today. I think it’s going to end up as the guitar part for a song with lyrics, but I liked it enough as a guitar part that I’m posting it up as just an instrumental. Nothing fancy here — I recorded it with a single mic, did a tiny bit of [...]

So, the revised edition of A Theory of Fun is indeed in process. I thought I would post an update for everyone. Where we are I have been going back and forth with the publisher on what exactly needs to be revised. I have my own list, and I was hoping that the revisions would be [...]

Ultima Online is, of course, still very much alive. But that didn’t stop us from doing a Classic Game Postmortem at GDCOnline this past fall. The GDCVault has posted it up for free here: GDC Vault – Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online. No embed, alas. The session was very informal — don’t expect a lot [...]