A Mind Forever Voyaging: The Original Political Game

In 1985, Infocom released a groundbreaking game written by Steve Meretzky that no one has tried to re-invent or iterate on since. Not only did it put its political message front and center, it also created an open world so ambitious that it might be impossible to create outside of a text parser. That game […]

The Methodology Behind The Witness

Much has been said about The Witness’s ability to teach the player how to solve its puzzles. In designing the puzzles, Jonathan Blow worked from simple to complex, and while the game is arguably genius in how it teaches the player, the methodological ideas behind it were defined 70 years ago. In school, most of […]

Games Can’t Portray Addiction Right

“This will be the last cigarette I ever smoke” is something I tell myself about once a week after I finish a pack. It doesn’t take more than a few hours before I have a new pack sitting in front of me. —  Going out for a cigarette has become a habit that I do […]

Danganronpa, Trigger Happy Havoc: Sakura and Chihiro

Danganronpa pulls from the same well as The Hunger Games – Battle Royale by Koshun Takami – by forcing a group of teenagers to kill each other. Unlike Battle Royale, the forced killing in Danganronpa isn’t an allegory for something else. In Battle Royale, the students were forced to kill each other by a totalitarian, […]

Rogue: Reflections on ASCII Imagination

Rogue was one of, if not the first, games that really captivated me. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I started playing it, but I couldn’t have been older than nine. This was at a time when storage was measured in megabytes. Back then, technology wasn’t even close to what it is […]