I’ve primarily found myself sitting in one of a handful of rooms, passing the hours by mindlessly letting the time pass.
It costs something to be a part of games spaces.
It is 2 AM in a dark bedroom, in a home that isn’t mine. For the first time in my life, I am experiencing a videogame.
The crew meets in the cafeteria, tense stares across a large table, with one space in the circle conspicuously empty.
There’s just an ongoing soft breeze, gentle drizzle, and a moment of quiet. Then, you leave, to another island or back to the passage of time.
The green glow on my arm shows that despite my pax’s erratic movement in the back, I am calm. Though these feelings may not last the ride.
The post-apocalypse is a strange place to fish for comfort.
Games are a great many things, and for both mundane and complex reasons, they are difficult to write about.
There’s a gulf between understanding what a game is meant to evoke, and intuiting what a player experience is like.
An empty, vacant soundscape resolves to the sound of rushing air. The camera starts on a tight angle along the side of an old military plane. It follows the line of an airplane’s body, as though flying in its slipstream. As the camera draws back, the view quickly dips down through the empty space where…
At some point, I stopped playing games just for myself.
Games with tight design and effective stories are easy to love, for exactly the right reasons. But I also like bad games.