it's gonna be live

In light of recent events in Egypt, and to a lesser extent here in Wisconsin:

Everything old is in fact new again.

Global Game Jam 2011

It was awesome.

Here is a board game I helped make called Meteor Strike.

More later.

Breaking Player Immersion, or Why Fable 3 is a remarkable failure

I should start this post by emphasizing that it is more or less spoiler free. While I treat on a number of the mechanics and design decisions in Fable 3, I've kept almost everything about the game narrative out of it. That said, if you haven't played Fable 3, reading this post might make you disinclined to get the game. Oddly enough despite the title, that isn't actually my intent.

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Buffy

After all of the noise around Buffy yesterday, I finally sat down and watched something from the original Whedonverse. The episode happened to be Destiny which is the eighth one in season five. After completing it, I'm a mere 14 episodes away from completing my second viewing of the BtVS/Angel arc, and it happened to be a particularly good episode for thinking about the series holistically.

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Thinking about MMOs

I've been promising some thoughts on MMO design in this blog for quite some time already, and now that I've finally started playing a little WoW again (with the impending release of Cataclysm and what not), I figure now is a pretty good time to share a couple of the ideas I've had over the years. The real impetus for this post came from playing through the pre-Cataclysm quests. I had just stepped away from them at the point that I started writing this (two days ago), and on the whole I was struck by how the narrative pressure that's building in the Warcraft universe was almost completely washed out by the basic format of questing which remains more or less unchanged. More after the jump.

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