On Entitlement: Are We Whiners, Or Just Passionate?

Image by Daniel Horacio Agostini, licensed under Creative Commons Just when you thought the word ‘fanboy’ had gone away and gamers could have conversations without throwing trite slurs at each other, there’s a new villain in town: ‘entitled’. It crops

Let games be as challenging as they need to be

In a terrifying piece on the future of video games, Steve Fulton describes the rise of the hardcore and how developers are reconstructing the challenge of yesteryear to make games that matter. It’s a piece that scares and confuses me.

Feedback Loop: Why video games should drag us kicking and screaming

Two weeks ago I went to a panel with Warren Spector at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. The conversation between Spector and Paul Callaghan, director of Melbourne’s Freeplay festival, was a fascinating look into the creative

Feedback Loop – Backward audio progress in Max Payne 3

A company that has a reputation for sparing no expenses spent 8 years in development producing Max Payne 3, a game with sound that belongs on the PS2. Instead of providing the cinematic sound spectacle I expected, Rockstar cut corners in ways

Feedback Loop: Games Aren't Fun

Step back. Preachers wail in the wind and call us to arms; accept the failures of men, but learn from them. Jesus, on the mount, rewards those not so invested in competition, but in resolution and timidity. Perhaps those of

Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

Feedback Loop: Getting beyond marriage

Cara Ellison is fed up with games that remind her of how single she is. And in a brilliant personal essay over at Unwinnable she uses the interactive novel, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, to