The Origins Awards nominees were announced today. Needless to say there’s nothing about it on the Origins Awards website—the Origins convention is affiliated with GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, whose website was at one time encouraging people to register for the Origins show that had taken place eighteen months earlier. As it is, the website [...]
Filed under: awards, oh for fuck's sake, tabletop on April 30th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
I have four points: 1. I do not know the secret to designing interactive experiences that evoke emotional responses from their users. 2. Nobody else does either. 3. It’s possible to do it, and it has been done, and it will be done again, and it will be done more and more in the future [...]
Filed under: character, emotion, game design, game philosophy, storytelling on April 30th, 2007 | No Comments »
According to a trusted friend, apparently Websense is blocking its users from seeing this website. Under the category ‘sex’. I am frankly nonplussed. I mean, I don’t think I’ve referred to any particular game as an “abortion” recently.
Filed under: information use, internet, oh for fuck's sake, sex on April 25th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Big post in the works. Meanwhile, some brief updates: Motorstorm (PS3) is very pretty but Excite Truck (Wii) is more fun. I was quite surprised how much fun Excite Truck has turned out to be. Have you noticed how some driving games don’t include any human beings at all? Excite Truck and the Burnout series [...]
Filed under: console, internet, rpg, wii on April 15th, 2007 | 6 Comments »
If you enter the location of an event as ‘TBA’ in Google Calendar, the system will offer you a map to it. Clicking on the link—which of course you would, or at least of course I did—reveals an entirely blank plan of Tabibuga station, Papua New Guinea. I know nothing about Tabibuga, but as far as I can glean from the internest it’s [...]
Filed under: google, information use, travel on April 11th, 2007 | 5 Comments »
To sum up the last two posts: Will Wright believes that a player’s satisfaction from interacting with a videogame should be on a primarily intellectual level. I’m not saying he’s wrong. In fact I’d say that this describes 99% of the games currently on the market, including several that I enjoy and recommend. That does [...]
Filed under: character, game design, game philosophy, narrative, storytelling on April 7th, 2007 | 8 Comments »
…hell with it, I will write a reposte. The problem we have, the huge great mote in Will Wright’s eye and also in the eyes of most of the people who have called him on his appalling SXSW keynote (see previous entry if you’re bewildered and lost), is that frankly the state of the art [...]
Filed under: commercial, game design, game philosophy, narrative, old media, storytelling on April 4th, 2007 | 7 Comments »