It costs something to be a part of games spaces.
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…
It’s all glitzy neon and flashing lights, and Kiryu is punching a man half to death in an alley.
The peace will never last.
I love guns. I do not like guns. They are fascinating. They are terrible.
Written for Haywire Magazine. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Subnautica isn’t a game about anything in particular. At least, not for me. It has crafting mechanics, certainly, and a narrative, but what really calls to me are its depths. The cool, crushing, oxygen-squeezing uncertainties of the unknown deeps and caverns call to me…
It’s meant to give the player a reason to enjoy the experience, unburdened by too much expectation.
Written for Haywire Magazine. This was a tough year. A year that brought a lot of political struggle, a lot of social outcry, a great deal of exhaustion, and not a lot of positivity to show for it. It was a year in which a lot of people fought hard for every single victory. It…
The wisdom gleaned over a hundred now-nonexistent failures.