Raph Koster takes a look at Connections, the new daily puzzle at the New York Times, and delves into the design consideration of puzzles and puzzle games to explain why this one is perhaps less well-received than its predecessors like Wordle.
I found this very interesting, and it pulled into the light a lot of things I had only experienced as instinctive reactions. (Including how I felt about the similar earlier Red Herring.) (Plus I felt a bit vindicated by the fact that one of the things Koster calls out is one of my favorite hobby-horses: the game punishes you for trying to learn.)
Ben Thompson summarizes the history business models of the most prominent game console makers, as background for discussing Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard.
As someone who lived through most of this history but spent a lot of it too young to have the perspective to understand it, I found this look fascinating. The shifts in approach play out differently based on interactions with broader market trends in a way that reminds me a lot of competitive players adjusting to a shifting metagame.
Jaiden makes a lot of fun videos with a recent focus on obscure games or self-imposed challenges. In this one, she plays Super Mario World blindfolded with verbal guidance from a friend.
It’s amusing and entertaining like most of her videos, but it’s also fascinating to see where the difficulty spikes end up being with this approach. It reminds me of Razbuten’s “Gaming For A Non-Gamer” series, revealing surprising things about what makes a game hard if you have different constraints from the typical player.
Sam Barlow (of Her Story fame) discusses his approach to building stories for narrative-based games. I found it refreshing to see discussion of how the medium affects what’s possible and how to get the most out of it, by incorporating challenge, opportunity for expression, a space to explore, and simulation of a richer reality. (I couldn’t help but look for parallels to my own, far-less-qualified, take on the subject.)
We can argue all we want about the relative merits of closed versus open systems and so on, but it’s rare that this actually persuades any decision-makers. What they pay attention to is what’s been shown to make money. So it’s exciting that Valve is out here betting pretty big on releasing the Steam Deck as an open system and that they seem to be having success with it so far. If that success continues, then maybe the Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/Apples of the world will start to take notice.
It’s also an interesting lesson on productization and marketing. All these unusual capabilities of the Steam Deck are really nothing new and have been available on general computers for quite a while. But by presenting the Steam Deck as primarily a Switch-like hybrid games handheld/console with buttons and analog sticks, giving it an approachable works-out-of-the-box setup and configuration, and pricing it affordably, it targets a new audience and is suddenly seen as a direct competitor in what had previously seemed like a different market.
In one of the frustrating ways art imitates life, games with systems resembling real estate tend to create situations resembling housing crises. In this write-up, Lars Doucet and Dan Cook discuss why this happens (hint: it’s the same reasons it happens in real life) and how to fix it in your game design (hint: it’s the same way we could fix it real life).
Super Bunnyhop contextualizes the recent large-scale game company buyouts by summarizing their history over the several decades the industry has existed and discussing the difference in how they are seen by insiders versus consumers.
We all know that there are a lot of Mario games. But how many games are there in the mainline Super Mario series? As jan Misali shows us, this turns out to be a difficult question to answer because of all the questions you have to answer along the way.
Some of the more-divisive ones include - is it still Super Mario if the gameplay changes significantly? Arguably, the New Super Mario Bros. games, which can be seen as their own side series, are more like the original Super Mario gameplay than, say, Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Odyssey. What about initial entries in sub-series spinoffs that are titled like sequels to mainline games, like Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island? And given the existence of enhanced ports and remakes, what even counts as a game? Is there a game called Bowser’s Fury, and if so is it an entry in the Super Mario series? It’s difficult to come up with a consistent set of definitions and answers to these questions that results in a list of games that feels correct.
To me, the main value of an analysis like this is as a reminder that categories are inherently slippery since they are more about grouping similar characteristics than hard and fast binary definitions, and furthermore that they can never really be true or correct - only useful. It’s something I try to keep in mind whenever people start arguing about genre definitions. Surely membership in a well-established game series is much simpler and more clear than membership in a broadly defined genre. If we can’t even agree how many Super Mario games there are, how can we hope to agree which games count as roguelikes? And if we can’t reach consensus on that question, then maybe it’s actually not that important.
