I’ve been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic lately. World of Warcraft pretty much burned me out on MMOs forever, but I had some old guild buddies who managed to talk me into it. We’ll see how long it lasts. It’s pretty much a stock MMO affair, with a few minor twists, one of which is the ship missions. Somehow, inside an MMO, they managed to cram old style arcade space-shooting – it’s like Starfox: stay on the rails and gun down ships while accomplishing your objective. You can upgrade …
Read the full story »
Previous Episode: Brave New World
Next Episode: BLOOD
Archives
The third part of Josh Forman’s 3 part series on gamasutra about storytelling techniques inspired this post, although it’s not required reading. Still, it might help to read his ideas about medium before reading this. Here’s a link.
Anyway, to point:
Games are built on abstractions, both from the design standpoint and the player standpoint. There’s no point in “real life” where pressing X makes a person perform a jump, or a kick, or whatever. It’s an abstraction. Game designers provide a world where players connect the relationship between pressing X and …
I’ve been trying to write a post about video game User Interfaces for over a year. But every time I sat down to really start writing it, nothing substantial ever came out, even though I knew there was a very important idea in there somewhere.
I’ve played hundreds of games over the years I’ve been a gamer. And every time I play a game for the first time, I like to examine the user interface. User interfaces are interesting because they are understood not to be the game itself, but rather, …
