Playing Games, Making Games

I recently wrote an 8-page analysis on Rez as part of my Video Game History class. Rez, for those who are new here, is my favorite game ever made and is a rail-shooter from the dreamcast era with trippy graphics and trance music, with more trance music instead of sound effects. The game is basically a sensory spectacle and very short - you can watch the whole game here . It is one hour long. Writing the analysis was a fun job, which involved watching a lot of footage of Rez HD. I learned a few things about the game in the process, namely that Rez is the missing link between games and movies. Looking at the entirety of Area 5, the game completely controls the pacing of the player's experience - the player does not get to decide when something happens. He is completely railroaded into scripted events, always moving to the next level on schedule. And yet no one would say that Rez is not a game. Rez basically exploits the mandatory movement of the rail shooter genre to turn the game in...

Whenever I get bored, I try to do some sort of mental exercise. Today was one of these days. I spent about 45 minutes waiting for a bus, and during that time I went back to a certain problem I wanted to solve: making a card game which can be played with nothing but the regular 52 playing cards and lasts a very long time, meaning that a single game can take several hours. Games like poker do not count, because playing poker usually requires some other material: chips, real money or something to keep score. I couldn't solve that problem, but I did end up with a game I think is neat. Give it a shot some time, and tell me how you feel about it. Card Duel Needs: 2 players, 1 deck of playing cards Setup: Take a regular deck of 52 cards (no jokers), shuffle it and deal each player 26 cards, face down. These 26 cards are the player's card pool . From this card pool, each player must construct a hand and a deck . To construct a hand, take a number of cards from your card pool whose valu...

Time for a rant about game design. Every once in a while, someone in a game development team jokes about adding something silly to the game. Maybe a unit with an unpronounceable name, or a gun that fires teapots, or an enemy that kills you and deletes your saved game. That's funny! It's a joke. A funny proposition. And yet far too often, someone adds "you know, we should actually put that into the game." and the designer says "yeah, this isn't a serious game, it'll be a joke". There's something profoundly wrong here. Having a game that doesn't take itself seriously and has less-than-serious dialog in it is perfectly fine. But those games are designed in an extremely serious and rigorous fashion. Take Plants vs Zombies, whose premise is fairly ridiculous and has you planting exploding potatoes. It's a silly game. But its design isn't silly - a ton of work has gone into making every plant interesting and unique in their own way, with th...