This semester, I was actually enrolled in two classes with the words "game design" in their title. One of those classes could have more accurately been named "have the C4 engine actively fight every design decision you make", but that's a story for another day. For the other class - this one, that is - my primary role was that of a designer. Along with Dan Spaventa (the conspicuously beardless member of Team ADD), I wrote out the specific mechanical elements of our game and was responsible not only for ensuring that they were implemented properly, but also for ensuring... Continue reading

For this assignment, I decided to compare the designs of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR), the only MMOG I've ever subscribed to, and Second Life (SL). While my experience with the former is much greater than the latter, from what I was able to divine from my studies (both within SL and from the readings), the ways in which I (and, presumably, other players) interacted within each digital environment were quite distinct. While many of the readings dealt with gender, one of the things I found the most fascinating about virtual worlds (as opposed to MMOGs) was the importance... Continue reading

For this blogpost, I decided to revisit one of my favorite games of the past decade – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR). KotOR was always interesting to me not only because of its turn-based combat system, but also because of its focus on dialog and personal narrative. This time, though, I also focused on the game's treatment of gender, of spaces, and of cultures, hoping to find some redeeming qualities in this game I love that will prevent it from being dismissed as your standard violent action game targeted at pasty white boys with a violence fetish.... Continue reading

When I began evaluating some of the games discussed in the readings for this post, I was at first at a loss as to how to evaluate their subversive and/or innovative uses of "traditional" gaming concepts, namely because I was unsure of which set of concepts with which to begin. In the end, I settled on the list presented by Pearce in "Games as Art" (2006, p.69) as my starting point, and to view how each of the games I've selected to evaluate treat each of the concepts presented therein – specifically, the concept of "the goal". The first game... Continue reading

In 1996, soon after the release of the Nintendo 64, a friend of mine introduced me to a game called Harvest Moon. Having sided with the enemy in the previous console war (I still don't remember where my Genesis got to), I missed out on the Super Nintendo iteration of the series, and was completely ignorant of the game's mechanics. When he explained it to me, I was pretty skeptical – a farming simulator? The whole thing sounded terribly mundane; plant crops, cut wood, raise livestock, get married, and on and on and on. That didn't sound like a game... Continue reading

When reading Yalom's analysis of the adoption of Chess by the Muslim world, I found it fascinating how strongly the game influenced (and was influenced by) the social conventions of Islam, specifically during the 8th and 9th centuries, and how some of these influences have survived to this day. The most obvious influence of Islam on the game of chess was the adoption of abstract pieces for the board. Because the Koran forbid "idols", many Muslims interpreted this as a ban on all representations of humans (and even animals), and so the pieces went from realistic carvings of their namesakes... Continue reading