Simplicity is obvious. ...

Hanging out in dorm room, listening to Dark Side of the Moon is a rite of passage, or at least it used to be. It was easy to get lost in those psychedelic riffs, spacey hooks, and mind-blowing jams while doing nothing more than chilling out and starting at a tie-died sheet on the ceiling....

Mario has feelings, and...

There’s an interesting article in Gamasutra that discusses game “feel” using the Mario series for its examples. It’s a little pedantic in parts, but I think it does manage to lay out some of the difficult issues that a designer can face when trying bring a...

First, get a million do...

I’m not sure if I totally get this article in the Escapist on How to Become a Game Designer.  Parsing the article, the idea is, as best as I can tell, in two parts: 1) Study and read a lot of things about game design and/or take classes. 2) Put your nose to the grindstone and...

Tearing Your Game to Pi...

If there was a name for the game that game designers are playing these days when they’re talking to each other about the craft of design it would have to be “deconstruction”. The way you win this game is to continually parse down a successful play pattern until...

Reductio Ad Absurdum in...

When I was in college the cutting edge thinking about artificial intelligence was what they called “scripting”. Although it seems kind of silly now, the idea was if you could map out everything a computer would ever have to do in any social situation, and give it a...