I don’t intend to solve everything with blog posts alone by the way. Instead, today I’ll set out quest markers to guide us from here on out. Even if you don’t immediately jump to your feet to design a game for yourself/others after this, I hope you can glide away with the capacity to at least consider some new possibilities for expression and creation.
Read moreGame Design as Expression Pt. 4
It’s a bit of a desert out there, huh? Which is weird, considering how big of a gaming boom we live in. But: consider the ubiquity of games, vs the ubiquity of writing little poems, scribbling a frustrated blob in the corner of a notebook, taking a picture on your phone to capture a sunrise that made you tear up for unknown reasons… we do little expressive gestures with most mediums all the time.
Just not games.
And, in fact, it’s downright silly for most people to imagine assembling a game with any ease that taking a picture or writing a poem has. A few awesome coders are talented enough to toss together some assets and make a cool thing, but that’s more of an exception than norm.
Read moreGame Design as Expression Pt. 3
Game design is a little funny because you often need to combine visual+auditory+procedural elements to make something work. But then again, rappers combine poetry with samples and instrumentalization. And I haven’t even brought up all the weird stuff that film needs to think about, like acting and set design. So it goes. But let’s get back to the main point - no shame if you forgot, I did too - we’re looking at what kind of person should seriously consider game design as a medium for expression. And if you think in systems, maybe that’s you.
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