February 12, 2006 Platonism and Game
Design Theory
So, I've been against a formal
language of game design for a while now. Last year at GDC, Raph
Koster gave a talk on a formal notation system for game design, which
was close enough to get my hackles up, and presented more or less the same
system in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Just recently
I ran into another, similar proposal from someone else entirely, and the
ensuing discussion helped me to clarify for myself why I object to these types
of approaches so vehemently. more...
July 13, 2004 The Parable of Irony This one takes a little bit of a setup. Simon Penny wrote
an article called "Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation"
for a collection of essays called First Person. Sections of this book are
being published over at the Electronic
Book Review, and one of the benefits of this re-publishing is that it
allows for comments by other thinkers on the same subjects. Jan van
Looy wrote a response to Penny's article, in which he accused Penny
of re-hashing the "violent games produce violent behaviors" debate and argued
against that position. Penny wrote his own response,
in which he disavowed the position that van Looy had attributed to him and
claimed that he was making a much smaller and more focused point, which
he accused van Looy of having missed and unfairly dismissed. more...
May 30, 2004 Game Studies:
A Model
This is a collection of some of my thoughts on game studies--where it's
going, what it should be, who should be doing it, and how. Along the
way, there's also some ranting about what's wrong with how it's being done
today. more...
May 21, 2003 The
Fallacy of the Future
While fans of Neal Stephenson may appreciate the fantasy of a world where
nanobots can create just about any product out of some raw form of matter,
the elision between “Designers at Adidas print prototypes of their shoe soles”
and “Other companies prototype toys, dinnerware, bottles, golf clubs, jet
skis, and so on” in consecutive sentences should give anyone pause. more...