Japanese Bioshock Ad
Bioshock PS3 (the DLC for which I worked on) is being advertised… in Japan! Obviously they had to dial up the weirdness and creepy little girl quotient to match Japanese standards.
Monthly Archives: December 2008
Jon Blow’s MIGS Keynote and Thematic Iteration
I didn’t get a chance to take in Jon Blow’s MIGS keynote from November until now. Well, I just listened to it. First, you need to listen to this talk. I’ve heard (and said) a lot of ideas that orbit around much of what Blow discusses, but I’ve never heard these concepts crystallized so effectively. [...]
Anime Little Sisters
Just found this awesome Bioshock fan art from an artist called Shuugo. It makes me hate anime a bit less; I’ll never look at the Little Sister’s quite the same way again.
Video Games Feed the Male Need to Dominate
A new study apparently reveals that popular video games satisfy men’s need to dominate. First, I’m happy to say that I called it first. Second, I’d be interested to see if video games would be less popular in a society that provides more outlets for these instincts. Aside from rough sports, we’re pretty starved for [...]
Game Word of the Week
Degenerate (adj) A degenerate game has very little strategic depth. Tic tac toe is a good example. Degenerate games can be played using very simple strategies with no meaningful decision making. These are known as degenerate strategies. A good game design does not allow degenerate strategies. Usage: I wish we could include an exploding squirrel [...]
Escaping the Black Swan
There are fundamental differences between games and life. Games have defined boundaries. All the possibilities are known. Cause and effect are clear and well understood. Progress is consistent and tends to be permanent. You always know how to move forward, and you can always feel your progress. Real life is the opposite of all this. [...]
Game Word of the Week
Strategic Depth (n) The complexity of the strategic space that the game creates. Basically, it is a measure of how many viable strategies there are, how many ways they can interact with other strategies, and how many decision branches there are that require players to choose between strategies. Usage: Chess has a fantastic level of [...]
Game Word of the Week
And (adj) A gameplay concept that has too many different things thrown into the pot. Lacking in focus and design discipline. Usage: There’s a lot going on in this system. It’s very ‘and’. Comment: It’s common for projects to be ‘and’ early in the design phase. We just need to make sure we know that [...]
Game Photography
No, not pictures of pasty developers with Cheeto-dust on their fingers. Photography of games. In games. We now have gameworlds with enough size, variety, and beauty that this is a meaningful concept. Don’t believe me? Just look here.
Game Word of the Week
Minmax (verb) To play in a style a player tries to achieve a mathematically optimal gameplay result by systematically working out the best way to play the game. Derived from Minimax, a common algorithm used by brute-force AIs to find the optimal next move in a game. Usage: I used to really minmax the Star [...]