There was a strong push for proximity chat after Marathon’s last round of public beta testing. I think there was an expectation that if you just add proximity chat, interesting social situations would arise. Playing Arc Raiders cemented that expectation in my mind as well, but I now think that adding proximity chat was never going to move the needle on a game that so firmly positions itself as a cut-throat, competitive, zero sum game.
Gamer’s Search For Meaning
What does it mean to win a game? What do you get? Is it a celebratory screen, with an explosion and fireworks? Is it a close up of your character flexing, the dejected enemy in the background contemplating how they got to this point in their lives, being a rhetorical device in a never-to-be-read-by-anyone blog…
Horde Survivor Survivor
Would you like to go for a leisurely stroll while your character automatically shoots at millions of baddies? Sure you would! Come with me! Let’s have a ~brief~ look at horde survivors.
I Read Too Many Books
(yes, yes, game design related posting will resume soon-ish, I think, but I needed to put this somewhere so I put it here.) This is a list of 80 books I read in the last ~18 to 24 months. I was going to do just 2024, but due to Audible’s actively user-hostile UX I can’t….
Overthinking Critical Damage
What if you thought about critical damage but like, too much? What would it mean to think about critical damage more than 100%? Wait, no.
Tom Cadwell’s Antipatterns
Tom Cadwell once posted a few anti-patterns on the League forums: things designers should avoid. In this article, I add 4k words and little of substance to the conversation.
Direct Player Communication: A Case Study
Originally the intro to the Tom Cadwell’s Anti-Patterns post, this is now about the context around communicating directly with your playerbase and I guess a little bit about who Tom is and why you should care what he says about design.
Standard Excessively Verbose Disclaimer
As an anxious wreck, I must wrap all my opinions and proclamations in a dense thick cocoon of disclaimers. This got tiresome to do in every article, so I modularized it. Consider this a function I can call whenever I need to say “no but really I don’t mean all design”.
Some Books I’ve Read
I could be normal and just post reviews on goodreads, but I choose to be a problem.
How? What? Why?
We can think of game design at three levels of abstraction: how, what, and why. Game Design courses tend to mostly cover the how. Why?