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  • Why Smokescreen is the Best Game Ever*

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Why Smokescreen is the Best Game Ever*

    I just published a post, Why Smokescreen in the Best Game Ever*, on the Six to Start blog with some game design thoughts behind Smokescreen, our latest game. It goes into a fair level of detail about some of the interesting features in Smokescreen and provides the reason why we added them; if you’re into…

  • A Metaphor for ARGs

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    5–7 minutes

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    6 comments on A Metaphor for ARGs

    In his keynote at the Netherlands Festival of Games in Utrecht, Elan Lee compared a successful game to a magnet. A good game pushes away most people, but still makes them aware of what’s going on; it pulls people towards itself; and it charges those who come closest, so that they become part of the…

  • Mastery of Games

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    3–5 minutes

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    5 comments on Mastery of Games

    Chess is not a game I’ve ever been a big fan of. I played a little at school, but I never had the patience or concentration to really study the game or learn the moves. I’d often look at better players and have absolutely no idea what was going on or why they were making…

  • The Shadow War: Getting Boys to Read

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    2–3 minutes

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    3 comments on The Shadow War: Getting Boys to Read

    How do you get boys to read? One way is to write entertaining and dramatic books, preferably including some violence. This is what Charlie Higson did for his Young Bond series of books, and judging by the fact that they have sold close to a million copies, it’s a pretty good strategy. Of course, in…

  • Austin GDC talk

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Austin GDC talk

    After becoming irritated about putting in a lot of work to prepare talks for conferences, and then for all that work to promptly vanish into the ether once my hour is up, I resolved to do something about it. I’ve bought a reasonably good microphone and have started recording the talks that I give to…

  • Teaching ARG Design to teenagers

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    2–3 minutes

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    15 comments on Teaching ARG Design to teenagers

    The vision: Eager teens, listening quietly and attentively as I led a discussion about alternate reality games. The reality: Thirty seconds into my prepared spiel, there were four hands waving in the air and the kids at the back were already talking. “Oh boy,” I thought, hoping to make a quantum leap out of here,…

  • Creating ‘The (Former) General’

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    2–3 minutes

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    14 comments on Creating ‘The (Former) General’

    I love all the stories in We Tell Stories, but I do have favourites. Back when we were planning the six week schedule for the stories, we decided to structure it like an album – start with a bang, and end with a bang. The first story was The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming. It…

  • False Endpoints

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    2–3 minutes

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    4 comments on False Endpoints

    In the highly interesting New York Times Magazine article about play (of which I’m sure I’ll write more on later), there was a fascinating section about ‘false endpoints’: Through play, an individual avoids what he called the lure of ‘‘false endpoints,’’ a problem-solving style more typical of harried adults than of playful youngsters. False endpoints…

  • Chabudai Gaeshi

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    2–3 minutes

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    6 comments on Chabudai Gaeshi

    In a lecture that Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario, Zelda, Nintendogs, etc) gave to Toyko University in 2003, he talked about how he gets a game completed: First you have to decide what to complete the game around. “This is what the game’s about!” You have to fish out the core, the fun part of…

  • Let’s make an Oscar-winning movie…

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    1–2 minutes

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    2 comments on Let’s make an Oscar-winning movie…

    …or not. There’s an interesting article on the New York Times about the recent blossoming of internet comedy, partly thanks to the Writer’s Guild of America strike (will it continue after it ends, I wonder?). In it, there’s an interesting quote: “I love it when people say, ‘I want to make a viral video,’ because…