One of the most contentious aspects of this site is my decision not to include PC games in the Quest. This decision is not borne of some hate for the PC as a game machine, as some have supposed. Nor does it stem from some imagined key difference between PC horror and console horror. You […]
A couple of years ago I attended a lecture by comics researcher (and artist!) Scott McCloud, which I throughly enjoyed. McCloud is interested in how comics work–he calls them “sequential art,” and his books are fascinating dissections of the fundamental artistic techniques upon which that medium is based. One of McCloud’s recent interests is the […]
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 […]
I don’t usually use this space to talk about myself, but I thought you guys might be interested in why my posting schedule has fallen off a cliff again this year. As you may now, I spent the last several years working at Google, first as an engineer and then as an evangelist for the […]