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Friday links: Race and Dominion online
Turns out that both of the card games I wrote about Monday have officially sanctioned online versions. Dominion’s had an internet-playable implementation on the beloved BrettspielWelt for some time, but I only today got around to trying Race for the...
The day I skunked MacCribbage
If you’ll permit me a bit of silly personal nostalgia: I came across this screencap, dating from the summer of 1994, while pawing through some old files. Apparently I managed to skunk my Mac at Cribbage — that is, I...
The Race to Expand your Dominion
The only thing worse than a flawed expansion to a good tabletop game is listening to some know-it-all groan about it. Complaints about expansions, after all, suggest their own unbeatable counterargument: So, don’t play with the expansions, then! It’s not...
Friday linkdump: Three stories about cubes
OK, two of them are about dice. Your Uncle Dudley’s Knucklebones appears to be the online gallery of a dice collector (with a casually Google-resistant identity). The mysterious blog contains only two posts, but the enormous latter entry contains many...
On shorter games
Quite by accident, my last post reflecting on the trend away from difficult slogs in all kinds of games fell on the same day that several indie game developers banded together to blog in support of intentionally short videogames. My...
A few iotas of Myst news
I haven't posted one of these since the Gameshelf got its stylish new (that is, Greek antiquarian) logo. But the fanboy I remain, so here's what Cyan has been whispering: The Manhole for iPhone/iPad/etc is out. (App Store link) It's...
More thoughts on the passing of cruelty
I find it interesting, as an aside to yesterday’s column, to examine how applied cruelty has fallen from favor across multiple game media over time. I chose the word “cruelty” quite intentionally, referencing Andrew Plotkin’s famous Cruelty Scale for interactive...
Take thy sting and shove it
I really enjoyed Limbo (Arnt Jensen et al), holder of this year’s Portal-Braid Memorial Award[1]. Beyond being a densely packed and very clever puzzle-platformer of exactly the right length, it has some interesting things to say about the concept of...
[Boston] People's Republic of IF Meetup, Monday, August 30
Our August meetup will be on Monday, August 30, at 6:30 in 14N-233 at the MIT campus. See our website for more details about the group. This month’s agenda:We’ll be the first to check out a new adventure game from...
Magick Systems in Theory and Practice, Installment 8: Conclusion
First, I'd like to say thanks to Jason McIntosh, Kevin Jackson-Mead, and Andrew Plotkin for the opportunity to write this series; it's been extremely useful to have a forum for clarifying my own ideas on magic systems. I'd also like...
Magick Systems in Theory and Practice, Installment 7: Arcana Manor
Since this blog series is called "Magick Systems in Theory and Practice," I feel that I should talk about my own practice in terms of concrete design of magic systems. For the past year and a half or so, I've...
IF News & Dungeon Report
It's been a crazy couple of weeks in IF, and we're expecting several more months of crazy on the horizon. Aaron Reed's book Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 has gone to the printer. You can pre-order it through Amazon....
Magick Systems in Theory and Practice, Installment 6: Metaphysics and Mechanics
A magic system is the sum total of its mechanics, interface, visual art, audio, narrative, and mythology, because a game is defined by its experience and experience consists in all of these components. Since a magic system simulates the alteration...
The Ultimate Alphabet: hidden objects kick your ass
Since the dawn of Ravenhearst, the hidden-object genre has been with us. A screen full of junk, and a list of named items to pick out... Was it Ravenhearst, actually? The web is telling me that I should be blaming...
Episode #8 - Modern Interactive Fiction
Please enjoy Episode 8 of The Gameshelf’s video series. It’s about modern interactive fiction. Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. text adventures), a curious cross-medium blending videogames and literature, defined computer entertainment at the start of the PC era. While it’s been decades...
Magick Systems in Theory and Practice, Installment 5: Magic Systems and Metaphysics
This week's blog entry is about magic systems and metaphysics--a topic which is to some extent a natural extension of last week's discussion of magic and horror, which introduced the representation of the supernatural as a defining trait of magic...
[Boston] Come play Zork with us
Sorry for the short-ish notice. This is our second attempt at an IF playing group to complement our IF writing group. The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction Presents: ZORK July 25th, 2 - 5 pm MIT Campus: Bulding 1 Room...
Magick Systems in Theory and Practice, Installment 4: Horror and Magic
The relationship between magic systems and horror is hidden and unexplored territory, as secret as the black arts that lurk within the games themselves. Horror as used here refers not strictly to the genre of survival horror, which is a...
The clouds clear for The Silver Lining
I can never resist the chance to follow up on two Gameshelf posts at once, so here you are: The Silver Lining is a fan-made King’s Quest game that, as Kevin noted back in March, found itself cease-and-desisted earlier this...
Seeking an alternative to enthusiasm
This image is one of the ads that has been flitting across my Steam dashboard lately. It depicts two characters from Half Life 2, paired with the blurb “The best game ever made”, attributed to PC Gamer magazine. And it,...
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