Many early videogames were inspired by technological innovations. Advances in natural language processing led Will Crowther to create Colossal Cave Adventure1 and John Carmack’s smooth-scrolling PC engine would inspire the future developers of Id Software to create the side-scrolling Commander Keen series2. Such connections are probably unsurprising to most people, as both games seem like […]
One of the things that I find most fascinating and engaging about videogames is their capacity to serve as interactive thought experiments. Games can be ways of making explicit (or more often implicit) arguments, ways of trying to understand the past, or even ways of getting players to reflect upon the present. As such, I […]
Last week, during Nintendo’s Financial Results Briefing, company president Satoru Iwata was asked about how Nintendo planned to monetize their upcoming ventures into mobile games, specifically if they were planning on analyzing existing games as they designed their own. Iwata acknowledged that the most successful and common strategy in the Japanese mobile market (which […]
Last week at GDC, Leigh Alexander announced the reboot of Offworld, the videogame offshoot of Boing Boing. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the site’s first articles was on Princess Maker 2, an obscure game most people (including most developers I know) have never heard of. This hardly surprising, because while the […]
As most sane people will tell you, videogames are quite different from real life. Stepping into a virtual world means accepting that you are entering a space where the normal rules are temporarily suspended in favor of the game’s rules. Huizinga calls this the “magic circle.”1 Thus, a moral person may do seemingly immoral things […]
