Games

Agario is a game about consumption: both the aggressive, taking kind and the supportive, giving kind. Consumption is the power fantasy underlying the game's appeal...and I find it more satisfying than I'd like to admit. Moreover, I love the dynamics that have emerged around giving and sacrifice as communication.

When games reference other games, it’s almost always done in a flippant, shallow way, but allusions represent a greater possibility for ambiguity, multivalence, and expressive depth. Games deserve—and are increasingly ready to harness—that depth.

I wanted to be an engineer. But not if it meant giving up writing or design. But I was looking at it the wrong way: labels should be lenses, not boxes.

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...