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Studying Narratives in Small Spaces, Part 1: Mysteries
At the Augmented & Virtual Reality roundtables at GDC 2015, there was consensus that moving a player through space made them uneasy. While in the future, I’m sure we’ll discover interesting tricks to ease the transition, what if we aren’t worried about that, and instead an entire interactive narrative experience happens in a single space?…
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Real Escape Game: Review
This Saturday, myself and 9 friends participated in the Real Escape Game TO. Its structure would be familiar to any avid video gamer or puzzle solver: you are in a locked room, and need to follow a series of (not obvious) clues to get out. As soon as I heard about it, I recruited friends…
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Players are Jerks to NPCs in Real Life, Too
A non-player character (NPC) is anyone you encounter in a game who is not a player themselves. They are controlled by the game, whether a human game/dungeon master or a computer simulation. Player characters (PCs), the in-game characters controlled by the players, are notoriously abusive to NPCs. Since the universe exists and moves forward for…
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First Dungeonmastering Experience
After wanting to do it for many years, and meticulously re-reading DM of the Rings, I DMed a tabletop RPG session for the first time last week, in a setting of my own invention. I had all kinds of concerns going into it (Will it be fun? Is the custom setting over-ambitious? Do I know…
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Moons of Sallys
Click the image to play Moons of Sallys, inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad. (More of a toy than a game really – you can just fly rockets around). I’ve nearly finished reading Stanislaw Lems’ The Cyberiad for a second time. I’m an old-school sci-fi aficionado, and it’s possibly one of my favourite books in…
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The State of Kinect Gaming
I’ve played almost every Kinect game available, and I have to admit, most of them aren’t very good. There are a few exceptions, which I’ll get to below. The “controller-less” aspect of the Kinect was what brought it so much initial excitement. However, we’re still not good at designing experiences that take advantage of this.…
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Kinect Body Paint – Kinect Workshop @ Pervasive 2012
Look at what I and my team made in a couple hours at the Kinect Workshop (run by David Kim): There are “buckets” of paint on either side of the space. One can grab paint and draw it all over your body and your friends! Only two people can play at a time. “Sorry”. Download…
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Playing your part
One of the problem with video games that have a story component is that the player you represent can behave inconsistently with the “story of the game”. Games that do not have a story component, such as most Will Wright-style games, are the exception. An example of this problem is the very detailed story and…
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City 7: Toronto Conflict Reactions
I’ve had the install file for City 7: Toronto Conflict sitting on my desktop for a long time, but I’ve been too lazy to install it. So, here it is. It’s a mod for Half-Life 2 that represents an alternate timeline where, at the beginning of the game, Gordon Freeman gets teleported to Toronto (City…
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Psychosomnium
Wow. I just played another excellent example of platformer turned into a compelling mind-fuck indie game. Playable here. UPDATE: I didn’t really emphasize enough how important it is that you play this game, like right now. It questioned my meaning of existence, and its ending left me shocked for a long time afterwards. Please, please…