~ Clampdown - Game Design (Punk?) Manifesto ~ / Stop spitting on AAA games // Stop dissing designers because they made a shooter you didn't like // Stop feeling superior because a designer "sold out", whatever that means in your textbook little world // Stop turning your nose at entire game genres // Stop looking … Continue reading CLAMPDOWN
Grand Theft Auto 5. Persona 5. Call of Duty 4. Civilization 6. What do these titles have in common? They are all AAA, and they are games from long-running franchises. A collective sigh can sometimes be heard when we get to the numbers at the end: "Another one? AAA don't innovate anymore.". Indie games, however, … Continue reading Innovation: Indies vs AAA
What are casual games? They could be described as quick and fun mobile, browser, or console games, easily played and understood. Because of their accessibility, these games are usually marketed at "non-gamers", in other words people who are not traditional gamers and who don't sink hours or days into games, but who could still enjoy … Continue reading Casual Nintendo: the Blue Ocean Strategy
The 1983 video game crash. A sinister sentence for gamers who lived the event or those who recently saw tons of Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges being dug-up from decades in landfill. What was this crash, and did it really almost destroy gaming? In 1982, the home console market looked pretty solid in the US: sales … Continue reading Rewind: Putting the 1983 Video Game Crash in Perspective
Review Information Game: Prune Developer: Joel McDonald Platform Tested: iOS (available here) Price: £3.99 (as of 10 February 2017) Hours played: ~4hrs My Verdict: Awful / Average / Ok / Good / Great! Prune is a 2015 game developed by Joel McDonald, around the ethos "Cultivate what matters. Cut away the rest." (McDonald, 2015). It … Continue reading Review: Prune (iOS)
Video games typically have a lot of information to convey to the player: stats, health, ammunition, maps, inventory, or even tutorials and actions needed to progress forward. This is done through a user interface (UI), which can take many forms and be of varying complexity. Having an on-screen UI can however be perceived to detract … Continue reading Immediacy & User Interface
What is realism in games? One might think of it as the way games' graphics mimic reality - in other words, their pictorial realism. However, in games as in other forms of art, realism can have many forms beyond a simple illusion of reality. Enter social realism. Social realism can be defined as "the realistic … Continue reading Social Realism in Games
