A few months back, I mentioned Game Seeds, the card game created by Utrecht School of the Arts, Monobanda and Metagama to help game designers brainstorm both character design and entire games, by playfully combining their specific mechanics. The post quite happily got far more attention than I would’ve imagined, and (especially after I’d posted [...]
In: Culture|Gaming News
23 Jun 2010Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani brought a rather incredible historical artifact to the recent NLGD Festival of Games in the Netherlands: a notebook full of sketches from the original design of Pac-Man. The thirty-year-old sketches show that Iwatani had a pretty good idea of how the mazes and Pac-Man sprite would work even in the pen-and-paper [...]
What is a game? Evolution embedded play into the very fabric of being human, so this is a question that has been pondered since the dawn of man. It may be somewhat baffling, then, that we are still unable to reach a consensus. Searching the web for the “definition of a game” will unearth many [...]
Regardless of whether or not you’ve played any of Sid Meier’s games, or whether or not you find yourself curious as to how he became a gaming luminary, or whether or not you’ve got 24 minutes to kill — you’ve got to watch Motherboard’s latest documentary. Its focus is on the history of Meier’s game [...]
In: Culture|Gaming News
25 Feb 2010Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular “Facebook Games” era.
In: Gaming News
7 Feb 2010Steve Gaynor, a designer at 2K Marin, understands that he works in an entertainment field, and provides a product nonessential to basic human needs. That doesn’t mean video games – and their makers - have no obligation to the public. News reports frequently mention studies that indicate some benefit to playing video games, whether in cognition [...]
In: Gaming News|Indie
30 Dec 2009[Veteran indie game creator Edmund McMillen, known for his work on 2005 IGF Grand Prize winner Gish, Time Fcuk, and Super Meat Boy for WiiWare, shares his opinions and manifesto on making indie games, with 24 clear do-s and don't-s to make your art thrive.] One of the most common questions I’m asked in interviews [...]