The journey to this article is a bit unusual. It starts with Tim Rogers.

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This one has a bit of a weird history. Originally, I was just going to have The Importance of the New Player’s Experience as a shared link, but I realized it tied in to some other concepts I thought were worth discussing and it expanded into a thought post. Then it kept expanding and I thought maybe it should be an article, but I had trouble finding the through line. I went back and forth for months on whether to just publish it as a thought or try to find a stronger conclusion to make it worth polishing into an article. It was Should Players Buy Their Own UI? that ultimately led me to a through line I was satisfied with.

Along the way, there were a ton of false starts and things that I changed my mind on discussing - so that means a lot of cut content.

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This article is about a pretty simple idea, so not much got cut, but it did take me a while to find the right framing.

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This is kind of two articles in one. On the surface it’s about readability in rhythm games but the seed behind it is the confusing arc taken by the follow-ups to Bit.Trip Runner. So I’m gonna ramble about those games for a bit here.

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Authorial intent has been a bugbear of mine for a while. I’ve touched on it before, but never put forward a complete position. Hopefully, this will serve.

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This one took a long time to figure out. I’ve wanted to write it ever since reading Brian Moriarty’s Apology For Roger Ebert and Tadhg Kelly’s essay on muggles in March of 2011, but there were so many entangled ideas I couldn’t find the core for years. I did eventually peel off the first layer and turn that into 2015’s post “Are Video Games Art?” was Always the Wrong Question but there was still a long way to go.

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It took a few tries to find the right framing for this one. The original idea came when I noticed there were a few games that I enjoyed for a while but which left me feeling very negative and I was trying to pin down what they had in common. While they tended to be games that didn’t end, that clearly wasn’t the problem - my friend Iceman provides an excellent case study here, because he played a lot of both World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2, neither of which end. In WoW, he felt pressured to play more than he actually wanted to in order to help out his guild, so when he finally quit he did so about as hard as I did and he never played an MMO again. But with TF2, he’d frequently put it down for a while and then come back just as strong as before.

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So, this one has actually been a long time coming. After my 2009 post about challenge and punishment, Remy77077 wrote an article about how punishment increases challenge in ‘Splosion Man. I commented on that post that I wanted to respond but it’d be a while before I could do it justice. Turned out to be over eight years, but we’ve finally arrived!

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This one goes back a ways. In August of 2017, Joseph Anderson posted a review/analysis of Prey in which he describes its combat as different from what players generally expect from first-person-shooters. He breaks it down into three stages:

1. Planning and Tactics
2. Character Building and Stats
3. Then Execution

He argues that most players will automatically assume the third stage is the most important because it’s an FPS. However, if you play it this way, you will have a bad time because fighting is actually “all about bringing the right tool for the job, as long as you know how to use it.”

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This one proved to be pretty easy to write. As a response to a very specific series of events, it wasn’t hard to find the through-line or keep the scope tight.

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