Today I received an e-mail from a guy named Ryan who, in the last 24 hours or so, has found himself at the center of a major internet debate about the classification of various horror games as either “survival horror” or “action horror.” The source of much internet angst is an collage Ryan assembled and […]
In March I was visiting Tokyo when Japan was rocked by a huge earthquake and tsunami. In fact, the earthquake itself caused relatively little damage; it was the resulting tsunami that claimed the lives of almost 20,000 people in Northern Japan. To my surprise the news didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the […]
Gamasutra is running the most complete biometrics study of horror games that I’ve seen. It’s fascinating research, and the end page of conclusions is particularly useful for the horror game designer. Most interestingly to me, the study finds key differences between how “core” gamers and “casual” gamers are scared. Core games see through scripted sequences […]
I got a lot of positive feedback about my article on the recursive structure of Resident Evil’s map design, but the highest praise comes from a user named 9L, who translated my entire feature into Korean. I can’t read Korean (maybe some day), but I assume that translating a long text about game design and […]
I read a pretty good blog piece about Alan Wake, Limbo, and Stephen King this evening. The point of the piece is that Limbo is better at horror than Alan Wake because Wake is big-budget, telegraphs its scares, and feels the need to explain everything. It’s a pretty good series of short articles, which I […]
You might have heard of Well Played before. It’s CMU’s series of books on game design, authored by a wide range of critics, journalists, and armchair game anthropologists like myself. The third book in the series, Well Played 3.0, is now out, and I’m happy to report that it contains an article I wrote about […]
For the first time in four years I’ve written a new feature for this site. This one is called Recursive Unlocking: Analyzing Resident Evil’s Map Design with Data Visualization, and it’s about analyzing the layout of Resident Evil‘s map in order to understand better how it was designed. This analysis is based on a data […]
I happened to be in Japan a few weeks ago when Catherine hit the shelves. I didn’t really know what to expect from it, other than it is some sort of sexy, stylized horror puzzle game, or something. Against my better judgement I bought the game for full price. The stylistic rendering and promise of […]
One of the ancillary benefits to moving is that it gives me an opportunity to reconfigure my home AV setup. I’m sure lots of people dread the process of trying to figure out which cable goes in which port and how to best plug everything into a single wall outlet, but I enjoy it. I’m […]
In my last post I discussed the research that lead to the creation of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion. tl;dr: It says that if your body feels excited and you don’t know why, your brain can be tricked into believing that excitement is caused by some external stimulus. Thus you can get people to believe […]