Mssv

The term ‘Alternate Reality Game’ has been used to describe a vast variety of different games. These include traditional ARGs such as The Beast, to single-player games such as Jamie Kane, to immersive theatre productions such as Faust by Punchdrunk, to collaborative games without central narratives such as World Without Oil. I’ve also seen […]

I’m not a fan of puzzles, and I don’t like first-person shooters like Halo or Doom, either. Despite this, I found myself irresistibly drawn to Valve’s new first-person puzzle game, Portal.
The premise behind Portal is simple; you have a Portal gun that can create man-sized wormholes in walls, floors and ceilings that connect to each […]

Improbably enough, I was on stage this afternoon with Alex Rigopulos of Harmonix (creators of Guitar Hero 1 and 2, and Rock Band) talking about how ARGs and music games were similar. During the course of the conversation, Alex revealed a few details about Rock Band which I am fairly confident haven’t been announced elsewhere. […]

Achievement
One of the most startling things about alternate reality games is what their players can achieve. When you have tens of thousands of highly motivated and tightly-knit players who urgently want to get to the next scene, even the most obscure puzzle can be solved, no matter what language it’s written in, or what specialised […]

There are some skills that ARG designers should quite obviously have: an understanding of stories, a good grasp of how online communities work and a very creative mind. One often gets overlooked - emergency management. No matter how well you plan your game, if any part of it is live, if any part of it […]

Like many others, when I was kid, two of the games I had the most fun with were Lego and Meccano. It would be trite to go into the reasons why, and it’s enough to say that construction kits like these offer kids a unique place to use their imagination to build anything they want, […]

At GDC this year, I remember hearing some writers talk about the sorry state of story and dialogue in action/adventure games. One of the promising games that they looked forward to, though, was Mass Effect - apparently it would have a brand new conversation system.
Over the months, details emerged. In effect, the game would allow […]

One of the most innovative games that’s come out of this year’s E3 is Echochrome for the Playstation; basically, if M. C. Escher could’ve made a computer game, this is what it would look like. I have some questions about the control scheme, difficulty level and gameplay (e.g. does the guy keep on walking all […]

Weather
In a book about weather (called ‘Weather’) that I’m reading, there’s a fact that blithely states:
Driest location: The Atacama Desert in Chile has virtually no rainfall (0.08mm annually), except for a passing shower several times a century.
Not several times a year. Several times a century. What impresses me about this is not the fact that […]

Like other game designers, I don’t play a lot of games.
I do have a Wii and a PS2, which sounds typical enough except for the fact that the only games I play on the PS2 are Katamari Damacy and Guitar Hero; Wii Sports and Warioware for the other console. Clearly I like quirky and accessible […]