A few thoughts on games without characters

I have a little over an hour to kill in the Minneapolis airport, I just linked a keyboard to my iPad for the first time, and I'm charging my phone so I figured I might as well take the opportunity to write a blog post. After all, I'm on my way to a conference, and the last several posts on my blog are older and were almost exclusively focused on the gamergate, which basically means I was being trolled very effectively and haven't taken the time to write anything since.

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Video games are not a monolithic medium

Video games are not a monolithic medium. I've said this before and I'll probably have to keep on saying it for at least a few years. In the meantime I've been wanting to get a blog post up to point people to when any of the myriad issues that come back to this simple fact pop up. This is that post.

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captain obvious

I know this might come across as kind of a shock to some of you, but I'm going to have to say it anyway. Not all games are the same. I say this in light of having just read Ian Bogost's article on conservative and aberrant reformists in game design (and the aesthetic filter). But really, that's just the trigger for this post. I've been talking about this for months, although my fervor was slightly diminished when I found that Jim Gee had already touched on the topic.

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