captain obvious

I know this might come across as kind of a shock to some of you, but I'm going to have to say it anyway. Not all games are the same. I say this in light of having just read Ian Bogost's article on conservative and aberrant reformists in game design (and the aesthetic filter). But really, that's just the trigger for this post. I've been talking about this for months, although my fervor was slightly diminished when I found that Jim Gee had already touched on the topic.

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Gamers 3

I've never actually written an elevator pitch for a film, let alone a treatment, let alone a screenplay. Still, at the end of the day I'm from Los Angeles, and it's a proverb as old as the the Santa Monica Mountains that everyone in Los Angeles has a film to pitch. Of course, I don't live there currently, and I didn't come up with this idea while living there, but . . . yeah, while, here's the idea:

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An open letter to the code geeks who keep hatin'

A note about this rant: I started it many months ago, and it felt like there was a reason for it at the time. Now I'm not really sure if it's warranted. Continued after jump . . .

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On Alan Wake - the bulleted version

I finished Alan Wake the same day I finished Portal 2. That was unfortunate for Alan Wake, but extremely good for helping me think through the construction of narrative in linear games. Spoiler averse post continued after the jump . . .

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A few quick thoughts

There will be more blog posts coming on various topics I've mentioned before (or tweeted about), I promise. In fact, it's quite possible I finally got past my bloggers block today by doing a little work on one of my slow moving posts. In the mean time though here are a few more thoughts on gamification.

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