While reading a web forum a few years ago, I came across a posting which was allegedly by a professional screenwriter.  I don’t remember the forum or the particular thread or I’d provide a link, but the gist of the comment was a criticism of a particular plot point in the storytelling of The Incredibles.…

In part one, I said that I was going to focus on awesome gameplay, as opposed to awesome graphics or sound or etc.  And since awesome gameplay rests on having an interesting and unusual gameplay mechanic, this means that we need to think about ideas. It’s often said that in the game industry that ideas…

Well, it’s a few days late, but I finally got to the game design musings. In the interest of the common good, I’m going to try to lay down some simple and easy principles that show how to design an awesome game. This first article discusses some basic types of Awesomeness, in an effort to…

You’d think that this is self-evident, but many people (both inside and outside the industry) seem to be labouring under the confused impression that video games are in some way like movies. I’m writing this rambling little essay so that in the future I can point people to this page when they tell me that…

It’s pretty easy to divide all video games into two groups. “Good” vs. “bad”, for example, is a fairly common (albeit subjective) division. And people like dividing things on that axis, so it’ll probably always be the main one, even if nobody can agree on precisely which games belong in each camp. But there are…