The End of Friendship: The Current State of the MMO

Some thoughts on social bonds and the problems with creating them in current gen MMORPGs.

Just offhandish thoughts more than anything else.

The End of Friendship: The Current State of the MMO

Discovering the Familiar in Gone Home

The thing that I admire most about Gone Home is its craftsmanship. It's a tremendous example of detail-driven world building.

The theme is home, and the world clearly conveys that theme because the world is home.

Discovering the Familiar in Gone Home

Fountains of Youth and the Undying Baby Boomers

This is a more traditional PopMatters column, crosscutting a medium's interests with cultural critique. My wife says it is good. I'm less sure of that.

Fountains of Youth and the Undying Baby Boomers

Saints Row IV: I Want to Be All the Clones

Saints Row the Third was stupid. Saints Row IV is often smart in its stupidity. It's also joyously obnoxious.

Play it.

Saints Row IV: I Want to Be All the Clones

Moving Pixels Podcast: 400 Days of Moral Quandries, Hungry Zombies, and Terrible Humans

Scads of thoughts on The Walking Dead: 400 Days and the value of taking on multiple personas.

This one is a long one.

Moving Pixels Podcast: 400 Days of Moral Quandries, Hungry Zombies, and Terrible Humans

Cheating Well (and Helping Others to Cheat Well, Too)

This post may just be a bit arch.

Oh well.

Cheating Well (and Helping Others to Cheat Well, Too)

From the Tabletop to the Screen, Shadowrun Returns

Shadowrun Returns is good, evoking a strange nostalgia for me for a game world that I forgot I knew pretty well back in the day.

That being said, I really want to talk about a tabletop board game right now, Elder Sign. I want to talk about the benefits of editing something down from the tedious and unwieldy to simpler interactions and simple decisions. Probably next week.

From the Tabletop to the Screen, Shadowrun Returns