Today I talked to Dan Cook about competitive games, social games, and our objectives behind making games in the first place. This was one of my favorite conversations with one of my favorite game design theorists out there. His blog, Lost Garden, was literally THE blog (along with maybe some stuff from Anna Anthropy) that …
One of the things that’s scary about being a writer is that the things you write keep existing, unchanged, the way that you wrote them, back when you wrote them. Sometimes it’s difficult to go back to a piece you wrote even six months ago and re-read your own work. There’s just always so much …
Dialectic with my 2012 self on “the importance of theme” Read More »
I wanted to write a few words about difficulty in games. First, the word “difficulty” doesn’t really apply to the kinds of things I want to make: strategy games. Or at least, it shouldn’t. Any good multiplayer online strategy game will have a matchmaking system, which does the very best it can at providing a …
Hi! Welcome to episode 53 of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast! This is the second of “season 2” of the podcast – it’s another hour plus episode chock full of cool features. First we talk about the whole “a series of interesting decisions” concept, which Sid Meier is well known for(here‘s his GDC 2012 talk …
“Decisions”, XCom’s “creeping problem”, and paper prototyping Read More »
If you haven’t played Artifact, you should give it a try, I think. Not because it’s good necessarily, although I do think it’s probably the best CCG (collectible card game) I’ve ever played. I could talk about the bad kinds of randomness in the game (pro card player Reyand basically describes the difference between variable …
I’ve been playing a lot more videogames recently. Over the past ten years, I developed a very specific set of criteria and tastes that made up a paradigm of game design. All of this lead me to search within an extremely narrow (and increasingly narrow over time) space for new games to play—Eurogames in particular, …
Four design lessons which were really obvious to everyone but me Read More »
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