Pong Backlash
Atari‘s announcement of their upcoming $100,000 Pong Indie Developer Challenge came as a bit of a surprise to me, after their recent app-store cleansing of any indie games with any mechanics similar...
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Working As Designed
For about a month now, I’ve been taking a game design class through General Assembly. There is so much to learn, many interesting readings, and discussions in response to the readings, and surprisingly...
View ArticleCircle Back
My game design class goes out to a pub after Wednesday night class. Last time I ended up talking with a woman I really admire, and talking about working in tech, and somehow got onto the subject of...
View ArticleJust A Compliment, Geez
When women are harassed, whether it’s a creepy come-on, an “accidental” grope, a sexist joke, or whatever form it takes, we often ignore it to avoid being considered moody or hard to work with....
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Dunning-Kruger Effect
I came across this photo from my game design class last spring. I shared it at iheartchaos a while ago, but I don’t think I ever shared it here. We covered this in a discussion about cognitive...
View ArticleFlavortext Superpower
As part of the class in game design, we ask the students to come up with unique, descriptive titles for their completed games, and to write other game text like a one-sentence summary or a brief...
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App Design Class
I always enjoy reading student work in the Game Concepts class. I’m so proud when students turn their rambling and epic game ideas into succinct summaries with player objectives, win conditions and...
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Giant Grumpy Goats
Showing off Grumpy Goats to my game design students. From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:Giant Grumpy Goats
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Social Gaming
After I showed Grumpy Goats to my game design students, we had a discussion about elements of Facebook games, and I showed them World of Secrets. One might not think a Facebook hidden object game lends...
View ArticleNeocolonialism
Neocolonialism is Seth Alter’s new strategy game of economic control and dirty politics. I wrote about Neocolonialism’s Kickstarter for IGM, back in January. The game’s out now, so I interviewed Seth...
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Not Quite Legendary ‘Legend Online’
Cleavage and Typos Are Rarely a Good Combination Legend Online is the second game I’ve reviewed over at GiN. My editor, Marie, assigned me the game and also sent me a very generous credit in Diamonds,...
View ArticleCursus Honorum
At our sprint review meeting on Friday, we met two new team members. “I took a pretty unusual path,” said one of my new colleagues. “Before this, I lived in Beijing. I know that moving to China is not...
View ArticleSuccess Marker
One of my current App Design students took Game Design with me last year, and today he asked if I would please tell him the story of Cow Clicker again. Success Marker from Simpson's Paradox Success...
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PanemVille: The Hunger Games Adventures
The Hunger Games novels suggest so many good games — a minigame hunting prey with Katniss’ arrows (a popular choice for the middle-school girls in my game design classes), a crafting and survival game...
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Saturday With Harold
Star Wars Pez Dispensers On Saturday, Harold and I went out to Winston-Salem to pick up some Star Trek toys communicators. Apparently there still are some Trek collectibles that he doesn’t own! He’d...
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Block, Block, and Block
I tweeted my link to my Depression Quest review the other day, and accidentally walked into the Zoe Quinn Twitter battle. I try to tweet my games journalism multiple times, because I’m a narcissistic...
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Bik Review on Hardcore Droid
My new review is up, over on Hardcore Droid: Bik is a point-and-click (er, tap) adventure, offering all the best of the point-and-click genre: There are piles of bizarre items to be picked up and then...
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Building a better action figure with 3D Printing?
In which Harold goes to my work party, but is actually thinking about action figures the whole time. Mobile apps and games now occupy children from a very young age. In addition to consuming New Media,...
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Videogame Zinesters Revisited
IndieCade East inspired me to reread Anna Anthropy’s manifesto/memoir/guidebook Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and...
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Captain Prototype
Remember that Captain Action game I started working on last year? We got the first prototype this week, and it looks so good. After so long on index cards and in shared docs, it’s great to see it...
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