What Games Are is a year old today, and it’s been a really great year. Hopefully the next one will continue in that vein. In honour of the day, I’ve pulled out a list of 60 posts which really start to tell the story of what this blog (and the book) is about. They are not necessarily the posts that gained the highest traffic or the most tweets, but I feel they are nonetheless important.
Enjoy!
100,000 Players For 60 Days
Adventure Games Deserved To Die
All Games Are About Death
All Games Are Played To Win
All Good Games Are Tests, But Not Vice Versa
All Great Marketing Stories Are About The Future
Are You Invisible?
Art Is The Best Business
Beware Arcane Actions
Busywork Is Not Fun
Camera Comes First
Cars, Dolls And Video Games
CityVille Explained
Constants, Constraints And Conditions
Currencies And Other Numbers
Do Your Players Know Their Role?
Echoes
Extensible Actions
Fairness Is A Perception
Find Games For Your Players
Fun: Simple To Explain, Hard To Accept
Functions vs Loops
Game Dynamic vs Game Mechanics
Game Dynamics And Loops
Gamification: Avoiding The Fate Of ARGs
Getting The Jumps Right
How Engagement Killed Gameplay
How To Look At Resources vs Risk
Interactivity Means Doing Stuff
Is Your Game One-Dimensional?
Living Galleries
Love Your Pirates
Minecraft And The Question Of Luck
Muggles
Numina
Pick Up the Gun
Return Of The GDD
Seven Steps To The Epic Win
Simulacra Or Simulation
Single Player Games Are Not An Aberration
Surfing At The Back of the Wave
Synchronous Or Asynchronous Gameplay
Techthulhu
Tetris Is Not The Answer
Thauma
The 3DS And The Decline Of The Platform Story
The Ding Economy
The Enclosure Problem
The Engagement Hierarchy
The Little Deck Of Game Design
The Post-Platform Future
There Is No Secret Sauce
Tolstoy, Art, Divided Brains And Roleplaying Games
Video Game Writing And The Sense Of Story
Visual vs Action Oriented Design
Weird Controls, Or Reinventing The Wheel
Why Must Orcs Die?
Worlds In Motion
You Can’t Make Players Feel
You Need $100,000
You Need 100 Hours Of Gameplay
You Need A Look
You Need A Marketing Story
You Need A Niche
You Need Four Coders
(Today’s image is from my kitchen table.)
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