Tag Archives: video games

The Struggle of Playing with Friends

Sharing a game with friends is a lot of fun…but it also requires a lot of coordination. Sometimes a level of coordination we don’t really thing about. And when things aren’t properly coordinated, we end up having a lot less fun than we should. In this essay I explore some ways in which friend groups can create imbalances in trying to play together, and how better communication can help address or prevent those imbalances, letting everyone have a more enjoyable time.

Mental Mapping as Challenge

Navigation is one of those elements of games that we all participate in, but don’t often think about. Maps are a pretty common facet of game worlds, and so we are not likely to think about navigation until they are gone. But while maps are nice, the process of learning to map things mentally is an interesting challenge that has its uses…and its misuses. In this essay I explore how games can get in the way of allowing players to effectively navigate the game’s world.

Time and Enjoyment

“Value” is a topic that comes up explicitly or implicitly within a lot of discussions about games. And yet, the topic of value tends to focus on money – am I getting what I paid for out of this experience. Yet lost in that framing is the investment of time. In this essay I explore how time, and not having much of it, impacts or should impact what “value” means to us, and how we might be better off asking if a game is really worth our time.

On Tolerance

Our views about games depend on our ability to tolerate them: when something is “bad,” to what extent are we willing to ignore that badness? Toleration is a complex part of our psychology because it is so varied. And yet, by asking how tolerance impacts our assessments of games, we can step back and examine how our own tolerances – or lack thereof – impact our opinions. And through that process, we might be able to give some things a chance we might otherwise ignore, or drop something that we have probably put up with for too long.

Moral Choices: Video Games, Judgments, and Rationalization

Video games can try to get us to think about complex moral problems through their systems and stories. But these tough questions can run up against an annoying facet of human psychology – our ability to rationalize. In this essay I use the ending sequence from The Last of Us to illustrate how the audience can use ambiguity to escape critically thinking about the media they consume, and what this means for game development.

The Consequences of Our Own Actions

Frustration in games is something we all deal with. And our first instinct is to blame the game for that frustration – it’s a problem of design. However, it is worth examining how we as players can create frustration by the choices we make in playing a game. In this essay I examine some ways in which players can play in “unfun” ways, and how we can start to identify and address those patterns in ourselves.

Teaching How to Play: Elden Ring

The journey through the FromSoftware games and their tutorials brings us to Elden Ring. A game at once familiar and unfamiliar, it imposes some interesting demands upon the player that require careful teaching. And so how well does it measure up? In this essay I take a look at the first few hours of gameplay and what lessons are communicated to the player by way of how its world and challenges are laid out.

Anniversary Post: Systems and Criticisms

In commemoration of three years of blogging on this site, I reflect on the nature of systems – the interaction of different rules and mechanics within a game. I provide an argument that isolating any particular mechanic and critiquing it misses out on important context that could – if we were to act on such criticism – ruin the rest of a game. It’s only through an understanding of how everything works together that we can properly identify problems and solutions.

Teaching How to Play: Sekiro

The journey through the FromSoftware games to peek at the concept of tutorialization provides us with a new perspective on how games can instruct players to become “experts” in that game. And yet the opening sequences of Sekiro leads to an interesting conundrum: how well can we understand a game’s teachings in the moment?