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A game I’ve been working on
I’ve been taking a bit of a break from writing about games to work on designing one. I’m not going to cheaply shift the purpose of this blog so that I just start to use it to advertise a game I’ve been...
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Gone Home: Forms of Subversive Creation
By Joel Jordon Creation in the content of Gone Home (the “story”) often comes in a form that echoes the form taken by the game as a whole. Centrally, Sam’s struggle to assert her identity in a culture...
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My Top 10 Games of 2013
By Joel Jordon 10. Bubsy 3D Arcane Kids are my favorite new developer. 9. Gone Home Its writing and the contents of its story may not reach literary heights, but still Gone Home is subversive beginning...
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Triple-A Aesthetics and the Politics of Appropriation
By Joel Jordon The history of games is now the history of videogames, as in these inelegant, strange, and often even monstrous things that took shape over the past fifty years. The aesthetics of...
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The Beginner’s Guide controversy and the nature of Truth in narratives
(originally published on my tumblr a while ago) I refuse to believe that the only solution to “death of the author” is birth of *all* interpretations – at least, it seems wild to admit interpretations...
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Freedom/Determinism and the Plot Twist Trope
Most modern mainstream videogames are about escapism. You feel as if you have enormous freedom, the challenges are easily completed and the rewards great, and the world revolves around you, the player....
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Continuity of Space and Time in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is as committed to the continuity of a linear experience of space and time as Half-Life or Portal, even though you can see the future at save points, are shown...
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Player as Foiled Detective: Negative Game Mechanics, Attention, and...
By Joel Jordon Killer7 most clearly positions the player as interrogator in the Ulmeyda chapter. Each animated cutscene has a character being interviewed as though in a police drama, but the...
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Time Bandit
By Joel Jordon I’ve been working on a game for a long time, and for a shorter amount of time I’ve been writing about it on a development blog of sorts. I thought it might make sense to cross-post some...
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Practical Aesthetics: How to Use Art as Argument – My Different Games...
1. A Brief History/Mythology of Theater Used as a Political Tool In his book Theater of the Oppressed, the playwright Augusto Boal characterizes the history of the aesthetics of theater as a series of...
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