malvasia bianca

I’m really not sure what to say about Noby Noby Boy. Coming in, I was aware that it’s more of a toy than a game, that you have to make your own goals. Which I did (and, eventually spent some time trying out the goals associated to the game’s trophies), which was pleasant enough, but […]

A cross-game comparison of play incentives. (Really via @smgrimes, though Twitter wants me to credit @john_carter.) Journalistic objectivity. Time for me to reread Manufacturing Consent? Massively collaborative mathematics. Game design as government. We The Giants. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and comics. (Via 37 Signals.) Going West. (Via Dubious Quality.) Omohide is going through all […]

I was intending for BioShock to be one of the first games I played on my 360 but, well, one thing after another came up, and it took me a couple of years to get around to the game. In the mean time, it has garnered some amount of discussion, so I’m fairly sure I […]

(First, a few notes: 1) I have a conflict of interest with respect to the game I’m discussing here. I haven’t worked on it and I don’t have any particular inside information about anything I’m speculating about here, else I’d have to be rather more careful about what I write, but obviously I want it […]

My heartfelt thanks to all of you who contributed to Michael’s and my efforts to gather money to fly Ben to GDC. We raised $935.50 from 40 contributions by the deadline, and a couple other people chipped in right after the widget closed to bring us up to the $1100 goal, making the effort a […]

I just got called for survey purposes (about the economy, health care, and the like); I thought that it was a bit odd when they asked me if I was a blogger (not just a journalist), but hey, maybe that’s the new best standard? And they seemed happy enough when I said that I generally […]

I try to write a blog post after every game that I finish playing (or, in this case, take a temporary break from playing), but really: what more do I have to say about Rock Band 2? As Bill Harris put it, it’s “more of a lifestyle than a game”, and it’s a lifestyle that […]

One of my biggest surprises when learning Haskell has been how my typical test-driven development steps fail: it’s easy to write a couple of tests and get them to pass gracelessly, but surprisingly quickly I run into a test that I can’t get to pass without actually being smart, forcing me to make a leap […]

How to lose an argument online. I’d been thinking for a while that ‘hardcore’ was only useful as a term in a polemic I had no interest in making. Three false constraints on game design challenges. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I won’t be able to avoid playing Dragon Age. (But I’ll hold […]

I don’t have a lot to say about Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box—it’s a great game (my wife and I both blew through it in a few days, and Miranda also zoomed through most of it), but it adds essentially nothing to the formula created by its predecessor. One thing that struck me: when […]