Category Game Design

Old Weird Games: Captain Blood

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…

Terraforming in the South China Sea

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…

Coding Ethical Codes

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. …