Games have a long history of pairing the player character with a companion, to vastly varying reactions. There is a long history of much maligned “escort quests” where the fail state of a mission, quest, or level is the death … Continue reading Why we Hate AI Companions
Procedural generation is a powerful, but sometimes maligned tool. When a game has an element that is created using a series of rules, combining a number of precreated assets with each other in novel ways, procedural generation is born. Anything … Continue reading The Future of Procedural Generation
What makes simulation games so appealing? From the Sims to Project cars to the wave of truck, farming, city, and colony simulators, this genre enjoys a great deal of support despite its seemingly niche focus. Some of these games focus … Continue reading The Appeal of Simulation
I was talking with an old friend recently, and we started reminiscing about a game we had played together years ago. The game, Cube world, was a combination of Minecraft’s blockiness and landscape generation, traditional RPG progression, and a decent … Continue reading Video Game Communities
My CYOA was by Ryan North. It is a retelling of Hamlet as a CYOA novel. I read a lot of the older books as a child, and as interesting as they were, I wanted to try something more modern … Continue reading Are CYOAs proof that illusion of choice is more important than the diversity and strength of choices themselves?
The Beginners Guide is a unique game that has a lot to say. The game itself is a metacommentary on the nature of game development, and the relationship between the developer and the player. The game is short, about 2 … Continue reading Why you should watch or play The Beginner’s Guide
The Old Man’s Club is not the most engaging game. The visuals, while immediately striking and eye-catching, consist of less than 10 lightly animated scenes over the entire game, and so, once observed and absorbed, are not engaging in themselves. … Continue reading The Failed Embodiment of The Old Man’s Club
Gone home is an excellent game that leans heavily on audio recordings to tell its story. Audio recordings in games have an interesting history. Right now, they are traditionally associated with lazy and contrived horror game attempts at stringing together … Continue reading Gone Home and how to make powerful audio tapes.
Gamers, those who engage with game worlds, have a tendency to create narrative inside these worlds in a way that was not perhaps originally present. A long running and well known YouTube channel, GameTheory, exemplifies this trend very directly. The … Continue reading Creating Narrative
In the vast majority of video games, health is represented by a point value, HP, which indicates how much damage you have taken from full health and how many more hits it will take to kill your character. Even in … Continue reading Why is Health in Games so Abstract?
VG Boundaries 8 