Eric Scwarz has posted an opinion piece on Gamasutra arguing that RPGs are not about story or decision-making so much as they are about rulesets: As narrative elements began to creep into RPGs, as players began to get attached to the characters they played as and the universes they inhabited, RPGs began to become associated […]

GameBanshee caught this little gem from Gamepro, published this past Thursday: The PC version of the Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII double pack from independent developer Zeboyd Games launched yesterday alongside Gaslamp Games’ charming roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor. All three are excellent games and well worth your time — cheap, too. […]

Or, as I somewhat-less-tactfully put it on my developer website: “So you created an action RPG. Stop congratulating yourself.” You may have heard about the recent (and highly unfortunate) Gamasutra interview with Matt Findley, in which the former Black Isle dev announced that turn-based RPGs were basically an unfortunate accident of history caused by limitations […]

I posted an article on SinisterDesign.net on Wednesday evening analyzing the RPG genre, looking for a common thread that ties all RPGs together. Here’s a choice quote: RPGs are fundamentally creative games: even the ones about killing and destroying everything. Because even those RPGs aren’t really about destroying. They’re about building and shaping your character, […]

This is interesting: general-purpose RPG news site RPGWatch has posted the results of a poll in which they asked people to rank this year’s upcoming crop of RPGs according to which look the most promising. Indie RPGs made quite a strong showing in the poll, taking second (Frayed Knights) and fourth place (Avadon) in the […]

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 […]