Tag Archives: theory

Video game architecture and the dimensions of doors in Gone Home

This is a door model from Gone Home. Anything strike you as odd? It’s pretty thick isn’t it? For comparison, I measured a door in my own home and referenced a Home Depot link on standard door sizes. My doors … Continue reading

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Virginia, video games and montage

I played Virginia lately, which is unusual among games, I think, because of its use of montage. What I’m talking about isn’t exclusively what people call “a montage” in film, (eg: training montage) though there are some scenes like that … Continue reading

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Games as systems of information

So lately I’ve been reading Rules of Play and I have a small discussion about something they get into in the chapter Games as Systems of Information. In it, they summarize a typology of information in games as described by … Continue reading

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Actually fact

So in this video from LambHoot, he says this: “This isn’t just my opinion, this is actually fact.” This is him saying the quality of Five Nights at Freddies is poor. And then he qualifies his statement by saying the … Continue reading

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Folk art, clones, genres, and N-likes for any value of N

Some things I’ve read relevant to the thoughts percolating in my head: The creator of Threes shows the email discussion behind the design of the game. To show that even though it’s a very simple game, it can still take … Continue reading

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Criteriological Types

From an analysis of gaming magazines from 1981 to 1995, I like this list of “criteriological types.” These have been noted and the result is a list of criteriological types including ideas like game affordances (what a game allows you … Continue reading

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Aesthetic of flashing lights

Thanks to the influence of animation and Edward Tufte, in the design of my own games, I normally go with the judgement that visual contrast should match the relative importance of any object within the game. I’ve been trying to … Continue reading

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Science fiction and explanation

I’m going to touch again on my earlier post about Science Fiction’s enticing of present-tense curiosity. I made passing reference to the opening scroll as something that is so often forced upon science fiction film, to its detriment. Science fiction … Continue reading

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