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I've been thinking about how most of my favorite kinds of games recently start off in a relatively established world, and then they have some sort of twist which launches us into a sort of Act 2 of the story. I'm thinking of games like Inscryption, Tunic, and Blue Prince. But in a way, I would also tentatively include games like Minecraft or Stardew Valley. This might just be another way of discussing story in games, but I think there's something so interesting about games th

I've been thinking about surprise and friction in media recently. My house and I recently watched The Piano Teacher , and by the end, we were all rather speechless, but in agreement that we thought it was a good movie. Without getting too much into it, I think Haneke explores desire in a really visceral and unflinching fashion, and it was a character study of someone who is constantly met with a feeling of inadequacy and lack of control that echoes every aspect of her life un

Game Metadata The game I'm reviewing for this blogpost is Wingspan , which is a board game designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and published in 2019 by Stonemaier games. Overall the high-level instructional goal could be construed to be about teaching players about different birds and the ecosystems they inhabit. Educational Goals The game appears to want to player to learn about different birds, their habitats, and perhaps their food habits, along with fun facts about them. In te

[This is a repost/revision of an earlier blogpost] I was having a conversation recently about interactive fiction, and it went a little something like this: "I think interactive fiction is cool." "I think it should just be fiction. Like a book. Or an essay." Leaving out all the back and forth of the conversation regarding specific examples, I think this brought up a question at the core of this discussion. When critiquing video games, what should we talking about, and more sp

This week I played CSS Diner for my educational games critique blog, which is a digital game designed by Luke Pacholski to help people learn how to use selectors in CSS. The learning objectives are very clearly to have players understand different CSS selectors and how to use them in their code. It appears that it is meant for people who have some knowledge of how CSS and how programming in general work. In terms of transfer opportunities, it seems like its incredibly specif

Something that's been rattling around in my brain for a while is how similar I've found the process of running a theatre organization and being on a game development team. Theatre Let's back up for a second. During my undergrad, I was very involved in my university's student-run theatre organization. I'm not that much of an actor, and I mostly was around doing stage management and other "technical" theatre things, but I eventually became president of the organization, and tha

My favorite feeling when consuming a piece of media is when it makes me see the world, my life, or the people around me in a different light. I think this is a pretty common experience amongst most people. But some examples that come to mind immediately, in no particular order, with limited surface level notes of some of my takeaways, slightly favoring more recent things: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer - Read when I was in high school, still think about it today.

Bananagrams is a popular board game that involves a bag (banana-shaped) with a large number of tiles with letters on them. It was created by American graphic designer Abraham Nathanson when he was 76 because he felt that Scrabble was too slow when he was playing it with his grandchildren. He wanted an anagrams game that could be played faster, and as a result created Bananagrams, which, when I played it, generally lasted around 20 minutes. To play Bananagrams, you dump out al

I was having a conversation recently about interactive fiction, and it went a little something like this: "I think interactive fiction is cool." "I think it should just be fiction. Like a book. Or an essay." Leaving out all the back and forth of the conversation regarding specific examples, I think this brought up a question at the core of this discussion. When critiquing video games, what should we talking about, and more specifically, for the purposes of this blog post, sho