Here’s wishing you a great new year full of fun and games!

Canadian gaming blog Above 49 has a post on the unexpected expense of designing an indie game, and the importance of people supporting indie games: It’s also god damn hard to make a game, even as an indie, for less than a million dollars. Another person here, another few months there and a budget can [...]

Speak of the devil: Kieron Gillen of Rock Paper Shotgun has written up a fascinating analysis of the purpose behind Starcraft 2′s largely empty player choices: Heroic lead characters rarely make mistakes in fiction – at least, crushing ones. The exceptions come right at the start of a story, and the story is about recovery [...]

When I woke up last Saturday morning, it was thundering: outside (loudly) and in my head (with a dull throbbing). I had drunk too much the night before, gone to bed, and gotten hired to write game reviews. And I was entirely the wrong man for the job.

It has been somewhat in vogue recently among a certain class of indie game designer to assert that games are not a good storytelling medium. Now, I have never made a secret of my views on dialog and other narrative techniques in games. While interactivity is of course central to any gaming experience, that is [...]

Jeremy Signor has an interesting editorial up on bitmob about what makes choices meaningful in an RPG: Many modern designers fall into the trap of choice for the sake of choice; they try to make the game meaningful with something that doesn’t change the experience much. Infamous exemplifies this in a particularly egregious way with [...]