strategy games

“Handicaps”, “Balanced Difficulty” and the one-player perspective

Did you know that the origin of the word “handicap” is “cap in hand”, thereby suggesting a connection between disabled people (who in the past had been referred to often as “handicapped”) and street beggars/panhandlers? 😬 It definitely seems worth moving on from this term and using another term in its place. While we’re at …

“Handicaps”, “Balanced Difficulty” and the one-player perspective Read More »

Why “quarterbacking” isn’t a problem in cooperative games

Been thinking about cooperative games for awhile, largely as a result of many of my recent thoughts on competitive games and the way that they inherently “socially rank” their players. There’s something about that that bothers me more and more over the years, both for political and personal reasons, many of which I’ve talked about …

Why “quarterbacking” isn’t a problem in cooperative games Read More »

CGD Podcast Episode #70: Actor removal, and thoughts on score systems

“Points quantify something which should remain in the realm of qualitative measurement.” This is the most succinct way that I know to express my problem, not so much with “score systems” per se as described in Ella Hoeppner’s recent blog post – which also spurred a bunch of conversations on my (now daily!) Twitch stream …

CGD Podcast Episode #70: Actor removal, and thoughts on score systems Read More »

Binary Goals with Hopenager, and Kickstarting an 18 Card Game with Adam Wilk

This is one of our longer episodes, coming in at 1 hour 10 minutes, and it’s chock full of both theory and practice! For the theory bit, check out my conversation with Hopenager, a game developer and frequent chatter over at the kbgames discord, wherein we talk about binary goals versus score goals. Hopenager believes …

Binary Goals with Hopenager, and Kickstarting an 18 Card Game with Adam Wilk Read More »

Episode 60 – Eric Zimmerman on game design theory (also, randomness with Brett Lowey)

I’ve been saying this a lot recently, but this is a big one! Clocking in at nearly an hour and twenty minutes, this is, I think, the longest Clockwork Game Design Podcast episode yet. Eric Zimmerman is a game design instructor at the NYU Game Center, where he works with other CGD guests Naomi Clark, …

Episode 60 – Eric Zimmerman on game design theory (also, randomness with Brett Lowey) Read More »