The Futile Search For Flow
There is a search in game design right now, a feverish scavenger hunt to pin down a holy grail of game design: flow. Flow is generally »
Lose Yourself: Disassociation and Games
The streets are narrow, cramped, decayed and full of offal. The inhabitants drift through the semi-ruined town, dragging their implements along. The only thing that stirs »
Far Cry, Negative Space, and the Dissolution of Enormity
Modern games have issues with scale. This isn't to say that modern games are small. We are in a renaissance of massive open-world games, from Grand »
The Future Rewound: Destiny's Transhumanism
"Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?” -Joe Haldeman, The Forever War The »
Building Communities, Beating Bigotry
Internet discourse is toxic. We all know it. YouTube comments, 4chan threads, online matchmaking; they all expose us to the worst that society has to offer. »
Glitches, Players, And Metagames
This piece was originally published as portions of a proceedings paper for ISAGA 2014, an academic conference on simulations and games. I (James Murff) provided the »