As a…fan…of these types of games, I decided to pick up Diablo IV recently. I played through largely as an investigation of this game to get a sense of what people liked and didn’t like about it. This essay contains my thoughts on the product as a whole and how it ends up often falling short.
Tag Archives: video games
Immersion as Invitation
Immersion is a word that we throw around a lot. Particularly when we want to talk about how a game has messed up – how it has failed to immerse us. But in the following essay I talk about how immersion should be perceived as not simply a matter of game design, but an interplay between medium and audience. Immersion is an invitation that it is up to us to accept.
On Storytelling: Theming and Humanity
Science fiction loves to pose complicated philosophical questions to us. And no question feels more in line with the genre than “what is a human?” But this question as a theme of a piece of art like a video game can be done well or poorly. And in particular, it can run into an initial bias based on which characters look human. In this essay I explore a few examples of games that raise this topic to show how getting an audience to engage with the topic is about more than just posing the question.
Going for 100%: Retrospective
In this essay, I revisit the topic of trying to complete 100% of a game, and why people do it. In particular, I examine the outside pressures that can push people to form this habit, and how understanding those pressures can let us better examine the behavior and its impact on our enjoyment.
Self-Deception Redux: Enjoyment and Narrative
One quirk of our own minds is that we often end up being bad at understanding ourselves. Our preferences and behaviors included. In this essay I revisit a previous post about self-deception, and how the stories we create about what kind of engagement with games is expected or “correct” pushes us toward frustration and away from having fun.
Speedrunning and the Long Game
I mentioned a while back that I got into speedrunning, and this will be a check-in with that journey. In addition, I share some thoughts both about how to get into speedrunning and engage in it in a healthy manner, as well as the ways in which narratives around speedrunning can create toxic behavior.
The Narrative Twist and the Immersion Problem
Twists are a common trope of storytelling at this point. The surprise of twists make them interesting, a way to prevent stories from feeling boring and predictable. But as we become more familiar with twists, they become predictable too, and that has an impact on how we consume narratives. This essay explores the causes and impacts of attempting to guess where a story might go, and how that can run counter to our own immersion within a game.
Player Expectation and Player Subversion: Genre
Genre is one of those elements of a game that we’re aware of, but don’t try to think too much about. Unless it’s something that a game forces us to think about. A way to make a game interesting is to poke at genre and what players expect from their games…but this can also go wrong. In this essay I explore how a game can set expectations that it then fails to follow through on, and how switching between genres can be done both well and poorly.
The Perils of Puzzle Design
All video games involve communication between the designer and the player. And that communication involves a language that sets expectations about how the game works. In puzzle games that language can easily become jumbled and create confusion for players. In this essay I explore a couple of particularly bad puzzles in the game The Painscreek Killings to showcase how video game language can break down if not employed properly.
Intent and Execution: NieR, Dream Sequences, and Player Experience
Games as a form of art naturally run into a problem of communication. No matter what the intent is behind a game, if that intent is not properly communicated to the audience, the execution will be judged poorly. And this raises a question of why players may miss that intent, and how design needs to account for how a game or a sequence is perceived to make sure the intent comes across.
Abstracting Games 