Soapbox: In Praise Of Save States, Rewinds And Walkthroughs

A personal journey to make peace with gaming's mod cons...

A look at the value of assist features in games, illustrated via several personal anecdotes.

Localization and Censorship

In this article, we analyze public misunderstanding of censorship as it occurs in the video game localization process.

Censorship is a hot-button issue in games and particularly in localization, but the term is often defined too loosely for productive discussion. Bagoum looks at a few varieties of censorship to break down what makes them different and where the problems come from - and the cases where censorship might actually be a good thing.

Good intro vs. Great intro. What makes a game prologue gripping?

An article about what methods great game prologues use to grip players attention, as well as about which goals they strive to achieve.

A checklist of what any good game prologue should accomplish followed by a look at the prologues of Borderlands 2 and Bioshock Infinite and how they stack up.

Wash your game's windows

Playing a game with unclear mechanics is like peering through a dirty, smudged window. This calls for some Windex!

Lars Doucet presents a handful of rules of thumb for keeping game mechanics legible and backs them up with helpful examples.

Bandersnatch (Netflix)

If you work in interactive narrative at all, there was a period recently where you could not go anywhere without people asking your opinion of Bandersnatch, Netflix’s branching-narrative epis…

Distinguished elder of interactive fiction Emily Short shares her take on Bandersnatch, Netflix’s interactive episode of Black Mirror. It includes a sort of a roundup of takes in which she mentions concerns and links to other essays that go more in-depth on those specific angles. To me, the most interesting aspect (due mainly to not having occurred to me) is that the thematic flaws are typical of creator’s first works of interactive fiction.

Group Report: Coziness in Games: An Exploration of Safety, Softness, and Satisfied Needs

Coziness is a common aesthetic in popular games such as Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, yet it is rarely discussed within design circles. Our group of designers did a deep dive to understand: What is ‘Cozy’? How do we make our games more cozy?

An in-depth and wide-ranging look at coziness in games - what its value is and how you encourage it. As a fan of cozy games, I found myself nodding vigorously at many parts of it.

Finding the Hook For a Game Trailer

The best game trailers cut to the heart of what makes a game unique, yet so many trailers still treat games like a product which is merely the sum of its parts. Thinking of games this way does a disservice to the game, the trailer, and the audience.

Derek Lieu, who made trailers for Firewatch, Spelunky 2, and Subnautica, discusses why game trailers should focus on what makes games unique rather than how they tick the boxes on standard features. He’s got more essays on good trailers on his website.

What drives retention

For better or worse, much of the games market is moving to games-as-a-service. Once upon a time, this was known as the MMO business model, because all MMOs were games-as-a-service, and virtually no…

Raph Koster catalogs the major ways to drive player retention with their associated pros and cons. As Raph notes, retention is key to any games-as-a-service model regardless of how (or indeed whether) it monetizes - it just means a game that players want to keep playing.

Nintendo Makes It Clear that Piracy Is the Only Way to Preserve Video Game History

By shutting down the Wii Store Channel and not letting users download old games, Nintendo is once again showing that in the modern digital era, you don't actually own the things you buy.

This isn’t a new problem, but the Wii Shop closure shines perhaps the brightest light yet on how anti-preservation many digital storefronts are.

How Video Games Do Feedback Well (and Poorly)

How games provide feedback …and how they’re lacking.

Jamie Madigan points out that while games are mostly great at providing performance feedback, they almost totally fail in providing coaching. This is a really hard problem since suggesting process improvements requires expertise and insight, as illustrated in the example of WoWAnalyzer, a tool for coaching World of Warcraft players that required a ton of work to put together.