A recent group of “de-automated” games explore the division of labor between humans and computers in creative tasks.

An example of how art arose in a game of Dwarf Fortress.

Innovation, in computer games at least, is always good. Well, that depends on what you mean by “good”. Is an innovative game always a fun game? No. Does an innovative game always make money? No. So what’s the point? The point is that every innovative game advances knowledge in some way. Even if only one [...]

The computer game Uplink rewards you for thinking like a computer criminal.

A minor feature of Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier can fool the player into thinking of the characters as real people.

Failure is not a bad thing because it helps people learn. The problem is that sometimes people fail in such a way that you really have to question how they’re thinking; sometimes you just feel like their entire way of thinking has to be torn down and started from scratch. In this blog post I’ll go through the various ways that Braid failed, and what made me angry enough to want to punch someone.

Games involve social contracts between the designer and the player(s).

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I often think about why people play games.  For a while I’ve been batting around a metaphor that I find useful: Junk food vs. Nutrition. Some games are simply fun.  They provide some sort of pleasure from manipulating the components or developing skill.  One of my favorite [...]

I’ve noticed that I haven’t really been enjoying “twitch” games, that is, games that have action and focus on manual dexterity and/or timing.  I’ve especially been frustrated by those that are difficult.  Today I started thinking about why that might be the case.  (Brought on by playing Mega Man 9.) The thing about action games [...]

So, if you’re not familiar with MyMiniCity, you might want to check it out. I think it’s a rather clever idea. The basic “play” of MyMiniCity goes as follows. Create a city. This gives you a subdomain, like http://cobweb.myminicity.com (Full disclosure: It’s a city I started). Each city page has a neat little Flash map [...]