I spent some time playing Blizzard’s Hearthstone over the weekend, and came away a little conflicted. First things first: Hearthstone is a digital Free-to-Play collectible card game, in the vein of Magic the Gathering. Visually, it’s one of the most impressively polished video games I’ve ever seen, and the card game itself is very, very…
I very nearly titled this a “post-mortem”, before realising that that’d have implied that I wasn’t going to do more Game in a Weeks. I’d like to talk for a bit about the Game in a Week process; about what it was intended for, and about how it has worked out, and maybe about what…
People look at me funny when I tell them this, but I’ve always had this strange, irrational desire to play a game where I got to pilot a properly huge capital ship. Something like a Star Destroyer from the Star Wars universe; something that takes a good three to five minutes to turn around. And…
I had a huge three-page-long essay here a few minutes ago, but I’ve changed my mind about posting it. Instead, I’m just going to make a prediction. Please feel free to ignore this post entirely. It’s just that the last time I made a prediction, it was in a web forum post on TIGSource, and…
An old-school simplistic definition would state that games are about choices; that “gameplay” consists solely of the set of choices which can be made by a player. You can see how someone who thought of games as being Chess or Backgammon or Go might define a game in this narrow way. A more modern definition…