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Why do kids act like that? I have noticed that one of the first things that many new players do is try to break the world by being anti-social in a way they never could in real life. They do naughty things like slap guards in the face, flirt with the mayor's husband, or tell off the sheriff. After all, it can be good…
The third level continues. Games have storylines like the historical novel, which arc from beginning to end. Games have cinematic cut scenes, pure montages of attraction. Games subsume the lines of television just as television subsumed cinema and cinema the novel. But they are something else as well. They are not…
If entrainment is a form of pleasure, it is a pleasure at once structural and experiential, both mathematically regular and playfully flexible. Entrainment is not a phenomenon completely unique to games, but it does come very close to identifying the curious structural pleasure that all game experiences seem to…
Game designer Robin Hunicke has noted that Facebook is actually a complex, massively multiplayer online game, with challenges, rewards, and levels just like any other. Think about it for a second and you'll realize that the rules are simple: be the most fun, intelligent, witty, caring version of yourself. The benefits…
These rules are written on paper, not etched in stone tablets. Rules are suggested guidelines, not required edicts. If the rules don't say you can't do something, you can. There are no official answers, only official opinions. When dice conflict with the story, the story always wins. Min/Maxing and Munchkinism aren't…
The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games o f make-believe. Like those games, D & D is driven by imagination. It’s about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might…
It's a game of your imagination, where you get to tell storeis by taking on the roles of the main chractes-characters you create. It's a game that offers a multitude of choices-more choices than even the most sophisticated computer game, because the only limit to what you can do is what you can imagine. The story…
So, what is a Judge? A Judge is the stage-setter, the tale-teller, the mediator, and the narrator. The Judge fills in the background, describes what the player characters see, and operates the non-player characters, ranging from ultimate menaces to the universe to small-time crooks to innocent bystanders to other…
In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell an advertiser's product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then, could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial…
It seems to me that every phenomenon, every fact, itself is the really interesting object. Whoever explains it, or connects it with other events, usually only amuses himself or makes sport of us, as, for instance, the naturalist or historian. But a single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable…
At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt's creator, discussed the notion of "time until death." All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can't spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a…