Archive for the 'video games' Category
The Joys of Abusive Game Design
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Cactus (pictured above during a recent trip to Disneyland) is a ridiculously prolific game designer known for producing strange and occasionally brilliant games with blindingly acidic color schemes. And according to several reports from GDC, he is every bit as crazy-provocative in person as his games suggest. Here are some reactions from his [...]
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Tags: cactus, game design, gdc, gdc 2010, indie games
Ashley Davis reports from the Game Developers Conference:
The names Brenda Brathwaite, Brian Reynolds, Noah Falstein and Steve Meretzky may not be instantly recognizable, but their gamemaking pedigrees are more than enough proof of their service to core gamers. Meretzky created, among other things, the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy computer game alongside Douglas Adams. Brathwaite [...]
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Week in Review
I began the week by imploring my Twitter followers to play Paper Moon (pictured above), a free flash game that I praised for its creative and exceptionally fun ‘pop-up book’ game mechanic, attractive black and white art style, and absolutely gorgeous musical score. Of course, most people (myself included) spent the week playing and reacting [...]
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One great thing about old-school NES graphics (actually, there are many, but let’s stick to just one for now) is that it allowed the players to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. This is why there can be “30 interpretations” of Mario but not a “30 interpretations of Master Chief.” Well, I guess [...]
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Quote of the Day
In film they say “show don’t tell,” in games the rule should be “play, don’t show.”
– Cliff Bleszinski
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The computer scene in the earlier days was often dominated by “uber nerds” who would collect lots of hardware and not actually have that much to use for it. My impression was that a lot of games were created for this market in the earlier days.
I love my “uber nerd” friends (“omg my new rig [...]
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Tags: game criticism, game culture, game history
Nietzsche chips in:
There are even cases in which a kind of pleasure is conditioned by a certain rhythmic sequence of little unpleasurable stimuli: in this way a very rapid increase of the feeling of power, the feeling of pleasure, is achieved. This is the case, e.g., in tickling, also the sexual tickling in the act [...]
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Anger is the righteous emotion, and anything worth a shit is worth getting angry about. The games which please us make us furious, the games we hate are disgusting, sad, and, furthermore, boring. Nobody who ever played a video game past the age of five did so because they were bored and frustrated. They did [...]
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Tags: game criticism, game culture, game lolz, spousal abuse is no laughing matter, video games
Quote of the Day
I view video games as something of an emotional therapy…it can be a relief, a kind of decompression to just play some video games. If I’m having some negative thoughts or negative feelings, videogames are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel [...]
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Tags: game culture, video game virtues
Game Reader is Back!
Game Reader is back after a long hiatus. Unfortunately, I am too busy to write op-eds or particularly long posts at the moment. For the time being you can expect updates that follow the original mission of this site: namely, to scour the web for the best and most thought-provoking gaming articles I can find.
The [...]
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Tags: Site Updates
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JRGBruno