My daughter, who is currently only three and a half, is turning out to be a fanatical gamer. She loves watching us play video games (she lacks the motor control for the majority of the games out there still), or playing them if we can find something that suits her, such as a golf [...]

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The lady and I just got through a 10 song set in Rock Band, on Expert Guitar and Microphone, and barely survived Enter Sandman and Highway Star (the last two songs in the set) by the skin of our teeth.  At one point, I had to save her on Highway Star; we were scraping by.
The [...]

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I was watching the CBS Sunday Morning News Magazine show, and they did a piece on frequent fliers who take flights at the end of the year for no other reason than to maintain a frequent flier perk membership.  At face value, I thought they were just crazy, but after awhile it started to make [...]

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Awhile back Clint over at ClickNothing did a great critique of Bioshock, and it got me thinking that designers should be doing this regularly. As an industry, we have countless outlets for reviews of games; a consumer level media wrap-up of a “buy it or not” standard. But what we don’t have is a professional [...]

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For the past twenty five or so years, I think I’ve always played at least one game on Christmas day.  I mean, if you get a new title in your stocking, of course you’re going to bust it out of the shrink wrap and give it a go.  You’d be shirking your patriotic duty as [...]

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If you have friends who play traditional rock instruments, you might have been party to a lot of this kind of behavior.  Ostensibly, there is a belief held that Rock Band and Guitar Hero is somehow “not real” like playing a “real” instrument is.  I for one find that laughable, as no doubt many other [...]

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A Lifetime to Master.
Look, playing games shouldn’t be needlessly complicated.
A lot of hardcore folks out there think that controls which the “casual player” can understand implies that there is not a lot of depth to them, and therefore no sustainable complexity with which to derive a “tournament” level of play.
It seems that the guys making [...]

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I was checking out an older post from Damion over at Zen of Design earlier today, discussing repeatability in games, and it reminded me of a piece I was going to craft awhile back trying to chain-of-thought figure out why we’re so dependent on guns in video games these days.
Damion explores that repeatability is behind [...]

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Lately I’ve been playing a lot of “casual” games when I have a few spare cycles at home. The vast majority of them have been webgames, mostly of the free variety. It’s become a small addiction/hobby of mine to find the gems among the rough. I suppose I should write about the [...]

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