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The Clockwork Game Design Podcast: Episode 5 – The Limitations of Boardgames

While it’s tempting to think otherwise, computers are the best tool we have for pursuing great game designs. In this episode, I also talk about how “abstract” games are problematic due to low information density, the information horizon, and a lot about the medium of board games.   Some relevant links: http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame – all game …

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The Clockwork Game Design Podcast: Episode 4 – Violence in Media

In this episode, I discuss violence in videogames. This is a less “game-design-theory” episode, and more of a culture/media episode, but I do discuss a lot of user comments from these recent articles. Cited in the article: “Dehumanization” on Polygon Beyond the Pentakill on Gamasutra In addition to those, I also wrote these relevant articles: …

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The Clockwork Game Design Podcast: Episode 3 – Tech Myths

Three podcast episodes in three days! My intention here was to get the podcast really rolling up front. I feel like it’s kinda crappy to have a podcast with one episode, and two episodes isn’t much better. So now there are three, which is a comfortable starting place, I think. Quickly I’d like to let …

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Asymmetry in Games

  A few years ago, I had written an article called “Debunking Asymmetry“. I think that that piece makes some mistakes about how it framed some of the problems of asymmetric forces in games. Quickly, a definition – “asymmetry”, in this context, refers to the player or players having different abilities from the start of …

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We Should Patch Our Games

I’ve been hearing more and more voices crying out against patching recently, and I wanted to unpack some of what people have said. I think this is one of the many designer-to-player communication issues that crops up in the games conversation, and so here is a designer trying to improve on(“patch”) that aspect, so that …

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