A current listing of blog posts. As I add more posts over time I will be grouping posts together to help ease navigation.
On Speedrunning
One of the weirdest and yet most fascinating method of approaching video games is speedrunning: attempting to complete a game in the fastest way possible. In this essay I’ll be taking a brief look at what makes speedrunning so fascinating, and the role of community in making speedrunning possible.
Talking about Games: Counter-Recommendations
Giving game recommendations is just an everyday component of being a gamer. We have games we like we want to share, and we’d like others to do the same for us. But sometimes loving a game and how we express that love can hurt the chances that other people will share in our enjoyment. In…
Peer Pressure and Puzzles
Puzzle games are often associated with “intelligence” – if you play a lot of puzzle games, you must be smart. But that association often cultivates some bad behavior: it can lead us to insist on playing puzzle games even when we aren’t having fun. In this essay I will be examining the social pressures that…
Talking about Games: Bad Analysis and Consumerism
We like to talk about games in ways that make us feel smart. It’s not enough to just say that a game makes us feel good or bad – we need to explain why it made us feel that way. And yet, trying to engage in that kind of analysis becomes almost destructive. In this…
Talking about Games: The Pitfalls of Analysis
There are so many games to play, and sometimes they take so long to complete, that we feel overwhelmed. Sometimes we’d like our games to be shorter, or we are frustrated with a game’s challenge. And so we try to turn that frustration into a principle of design – how could I make this game…
On Storytelling: Playstyles and Endings
Ideally, a video game’s story should react to your actions as a player. How you play the game should affect the story. And yet, that fascination with interactive storytelling lends itself to problems about how we approach a given game – or maybe even games in general. To what extent might your own approach continually…
The Struggle of Predicting Players
Sometimes the most interesting stories are the ones that mess with you in some way. But messing with the audience in some way requires predicting how people will react – if you miss the setup, then the payoff never hits. But no matter how hard we try, perfectly predicting the audience is impossible, and it…
Being Comfortable with Our Own Judgments
Gatekeeping is a frustrating component of enjoying games. People who seek to tell us the right games to play and the right way to play them ruin the experience of gaming itself. And yet, we tend to let these people not just dominate the conversation, but dominate our own perceptions of games. In this essay…
Fun with Friends
Just a brief essay on different experiences playing games with friends.
“You Should Try This Game”
As people who love playing video games, we love to share that interest with others. And that can include sharing it with people who don’t play games themselves. Meaning that we often face the problem of “what game should I suggest to introduce this person to video games?” However, in this essay I explain how…
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Abstracting Games 