Allison's bookmarks (tagged games)

Most recent

No Vehicles In The Park

"You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. For instance, you could list all of the different sorts of vehicles from this game in either the yes or the no column. I don't think this is true. I think you can reduce the problem, but I don't think you can eliminate it."

moderation socialsoftware culture games law

A card game is teaching players about the future of renewable energy

"I like the skeuomorphism of playing cards in video games because they instantly communicate aspects of chance and probability, as well as common affordances like 'drag to play' or discard. They are also able to represent heterogeneous actions. Had the game been a top-down tycoon game, things like public transportation, job training, or insulation retrofits would have been more difficult to visualize as objects you drop on a map. [...] [A]nother design problem addressed by the deck-building gameplay: instead of choosing an action and then choosing where to apply it, the action is already chosen for you, so your choice is about where and not what."

games gamedesign climate rhetoric

Black Box Mechanics — Crab Fragment Labs

"The reason that black box mechanics are so dicey outside of the casino is that it’s not always clear that a player has opted into the metagame, or that they are qualified to give consent. Those qualifications are, basically, maturity and intelligence, specifically with regard to the mechanics of the game. Any repeatable real-money transaction, such as a loot box, breaks the magic circle and turns every armchair into a swimming pool."

games gamedesign psychology culture

Well, Here We Are - by Frank Lantz - Donkeyspace

"It matters that the first staticky voices we’ve dialed in with our massive, multi-billion-parameter arrays are dreamers, confabulators, and improvisers. It matters that Chess and Go, the sites where we first encountered their older, more serious siblings, are artworks. Artworks carved out of instrumental reason. Artworks that, long before computers existed, were spinning beautiful webs of logic and attention. Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future."

ai poetics games

Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?) - k-hole

'“What already works” is a fundamentally conservative and nostalgic lens through which to view cultural production. Looking at “what already works” rejects an idea or potential of progress, and instead narrows the scope of possibility of a medium to only be capable or remediating its greatest hits.' [...] 'People already famous from producing “works” are now focused on meta-work, their cultural capital gained from doing that work in the first place now refocused on producing content related to their strongest signifiers.' (but how do you distinguish nostalgia from maintenance and re-absorbing work into the commons?)

games design culture

Game of Objects

"We are aware that we are not experiencing the world "directly", but this does not change our feeling that we are experiencing the world."

games simulation philosophy

gridmapper

elegant little utility for drawing dungeon maps

games rpg

Blabrecs

"BLABRECS is a rules modification for the wordgame SCRABBLE that swaps out the dictionary of real-if-obscure English words for a capricious artificial intelligence. In BLABRECS, real English words aren't allowed! Instead, you have to play nonsense words that sound like English to the AI. These nonsense words are called – you guessed it – BLABRECS."

machinelearning wordgames text poetics language games

Gruescript by Robin Johnson

"... modelled after two tools I admire for their accessibility, cuteness, and strong followings among fringe gamedevs: Bitsy and Puzzlescript. My aspiration for Gruescript is to be IF's answer to those."

games narrative

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

"We began the development with some clear goals: create an RPG set in late 90s New Jersey (as RPGs rarely are set in modern times), strike a healthy balance between humor and a compelling plot, as well as make a world with depth. We looked outside of games for inspiration, particularly to author Haruki Murakami. He is an incredible writer, our favorite living author, and someone who makes you feel as if he’s writing your dreams. We made sure everyone on the team read his entire collective works before we began development." (text from related article here https://blog.us.playstation.com/2019/01/16/inside-the-classic-rpg-and-literary-influences-of-yiik-out-tomorrow/)

playme games rpg