More Canon, Less Canonical (Part II)

Our experience of video games will be richer if we can avoid the archival mindset of film, and instead ask game developers to periodically revisit old games the way theater artists approach a new production: by fully reimagining it for the here and now

Look, gravity works! (once you add rigidbodies)

I’m teaching myself Unity, which is actually a lot of fun. It’s like a whole bunch of other pieces of software and programming tools that I’ve used all had a big love-in and spawned this one thing that does it all. Or that’s how it seems right now, when admittedly I know very little. So […]

More Canon, Less Canonical (Part I)

In video game fandom the word “canon” is typically used in the sense of “canonical”: official, authoritative, and approved. But how might the theater’s approach to a “canon of past works” be applied to video games and video game IPs?

A creation myth for Biellia

“Worldbuilding shorts” are where I start with a simple idea, situation, or story for a world, then extrapolate out from there to see where it leads me. This story if called “Brush and Glance, and the Dreaming Wolf,” and it’s a creation myth for the land of Biellia

Show me the research: Tamriel weaponry

I spend a lot of time in my job looking at visual research, and particularly visual research of an architectural nature. So as I play games I often find bits of the game world that remind me strongly of something in our own world—a place, a building, a particular photo or painting. Now, I’m certainly […]

Show me the research: the Jarl’s Longhouses of Skyrim

Chunking Rotations Addendum

Two more observations about my button layouts in Final Fantasy XIV One other layout I use which is specific to the Bard (and the other two physical ranged DPS jobs, the Machinist and the Dancer) has to do with a set of abilities that are named after parts of the body: Head Graze, Leg Graze, […]

Chunking Rotations and Pivoting Thumbs

Using interaction design to customize my gaming experience Amongst players of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) there is a ritual, bordering on being an obsession, of selecting which keys and buttons will invoke your character’s various abilities during gameplay. I would like to use the lens of interaction design to suggest an approach […]

Time skip

Remember at the end of season 3 of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, when it jumped forward “One year later” and then we spent the next half a season learning about what had happened during the skipped time? Yeah so this blog is doing that now. It’s been five-and-a-half years since my last entry, and unsurprisingly, […]

Awesome used bookstores are awesome

Scored a bunch of Darkover books at the inestimable Twice Sold Tales in Capitol Hill, one of my favorite used bookshops from when I lived in Seattle. (In the years since I left they have relocated to, I kid you not, directly across the street from my old apartment. That would’ve been so dangerous during grad school.) […]