I’ve been thinking about what’s appropriate for this blog. Should it be solely about games and game design? The subtitle says “Explorations into game design and creativity”…and I think that’s the answer. Creativity is important to me, and game design is one of the most important expressions of creativity for me…but it’s far from the [...]

Many efforts have been made to divide computer game players up into different types, in attempts to better understand why players play games, and thus how to make computer games that players will enjoy. One of my favorite attempts at player classification is Mitch Krpata’s A New Taxonomy of Gamers (this link goes to the [...]

Flow is a term that gets bandied about every now and then in game design. For a good overview, there’s Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis. I’ll provide a very quick summary: If a game is too easy, the player can feel bored. If a game is too hard, the player can feel frustrated. In that zone [...]

The basics of exploits and unfair advantages.

The dominant feature of “social games” isn’t that they’re social, it’s something else.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Eversion are examples of platformers featuring change of state.

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

“Audience-prompted storytelling” is my name for a relatively new form of storytelling.

Games consist of mechanics, statistics and setting material.

Some games manage to simulate “warzones” as a metagame.