Being childish is a bad thing. The term brings to mind the kind of pure selfishness that comes with a lack of life experience, the inability to register the considerations of others and the solipsist belief that your concerns are…
Blog Archives
A Game of This Year Award: Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing
There are very few games that pull off comedic timing as well as Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing. As written about in an interview with developer Holy Wow earlier this year, IPTT is simultaneously a subversive parody of the classic hokey…
A New Perspective on Game Writing
And now, an excerpt from the novelization of this year’s Interactive Game Society Award Winner for Best Writing, Murder Avenue. I thought he was crazy. We both knew the odds of Cob Tyler coming back to his old stomping grounds…
Honor Thy Player’s Time
It’s a glorious Sunday morning. You stir and stretch in your bed, a mess of wonderfully soft sheets and covers. The whole day is open. Will you laze around for a bit more? Get up and go for a walk,…
Posted in game design, game dev tips Tagged with: criticism, Final Fantasy, game design, motivation, narrative, Steel Battalion
Giving Up Control to Grow as Gamers
Every video game you’ve ever played is about control. If something is even to qualify as a video game as opposed to machinima or animation, there needs to be at least one player, and there needs to be an input…
Posted in culture, future, game design, narrative Tagged with: choice, control, criticism, game design, Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead, upcoming, virtual reality
The Problem with Game Reviews (And Why Games Are Like Restaurants)
What’s the one thing missing from every book review that’s ever been written? The number at the end. Isn’t it interesting how books, an artistic medium thousands of years old, has resisted the kind of numerical classification that has invaded…
Is the World Ready for Game Criticism?
Maybe 2012 will be the year that games grew up. After all, it was the year that the Smithsonian presented The Art of Video Games, “one of the first exhibitions to explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an…
Hi there, I'm Ben Serviss. I'm a software engineer, game designer and producer. Check out Dashjump for more on my game projects.