Critical Distance

Designing Games to Learn

As I've been writing this series of newsletters on learning and video games, there's been a spectre lurking in the background. Video games and education. Edutainment.

Building games that can be understood at a glance

Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018

Reconnect

Games writing isn't dead! Discover thousands of gaming articles here on Reconnect.

The Pentaract

The AppView for the games.gamesgamesgamesgames.* ATProto lexicons

NeoDB

reviews about book, film, music, podcast and game.

News - This Week in Videogames

Covering the important things happening in the world of videogames. News, reviews, and insights without ads or filler content.

Introducing The Pentaract: A Comprehensive Set of Video Game Lexicons for ATProto

Some of you already know that I’ve been working on-and-off on a lexicon for video games. I figured it would be a good idea to put the lexicon up for further discussion, and to make sure I’m headed down the right path with things. But why? Last year, the video games industry experienced a significant upheaval when radical groups leveraged moral panic to pressure payment processors, which in turn pressured games platforms to remove NSFW applications. This resulted in a lot of underrepresented dev...

gamesgamesgamesgamesgames/lexicon

An open data standard for describing video games and their data on ATProto.

The Art Of Marathon

A look at some of the work that went into one of the coolest-looking video games in recent memory

17. A Value for n-Person Games

17. A Value for n-Person Games was published in Contributions to the Theory of Games, Volume II on page 307.

» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian

One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.