Games

The first time I played Dark Souls, it broke me. I actually cried. I’m one of those silly gamers that has built some kind of...

I’m joining luminary game designers Heather Logas and Squinky to help organize an event in June called the Santa Cruz Retreat for Analog Play (SCRAP). In many ways, we’re designing SCRAP around the idea of an un-hack.

Last Friday I was totally buried and couldn’t make it to the Scholar’s Play stream, so I logged in to watch. For the first time I really understood why people watch other people play games, something I hadn’t even really figured out when we started the stream.

A few weeks ago, IF author Porpentine created a game jam for tiny hypertext games called TwinyJam. The goal was to create a hypertext game in 300 words or less. The results were impressive; 239 games were entered into the jam.

Since I was very young, I have hated playing video games in front of people, especially if I’ve never played the game before. This...

“Organizing a game jam follows roughly the same energy curve as participating in one,” a friend observed. First you’re really excited at the prospect...

Paperknife is an evocative experimental hypertext game that uses virtual space as a literal interpretation of branching narrative structures. You play as a child psychologist who’s...

Mike Cook, the researcher behind the Angelina game-generating AI system, recently spoke at VideoBrains about gamers’ lack of imagination. Gamers, he argues, do not...