Self-described “sissy wheelhouse”-dweller Brian Howe reviews Bulletstorm for Kill Screen magazine:

Bulletstorm’s relative lack of difficulty is directly responsible for that ideal flow: it actually feels cinematic. While the story and rhythm of super-hard shooters get indigestibly broken up in retry loops, Bulletstorm proceeded so smoothly that I was able to follow the storyline (which, while related in a merrily profane tone, raises credibly thought-provoking questions about loyalty and moral responsibility). Then there’s the impeccable rhythm of the gameplay itself. At moments I would pause to gaze out over a stunning bay, before running into the next room to try and shoot an incendiary rocket into a mutant’s scrotum; and the beauty of these lulls was sharpened by the taut momentum of the amazing set pieces around them.

Who says profanity and art can’t mix?

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is definitely the start of a shining game industry career. Watch out EA.

Fast Company has a great interview with some of the makers of Portal 2. This quote from lead writer Erik Wolpaw on experiential versus expositional story caught my eye:

We try an put as much as we can—if it were up to us we would get everything in the experiential side because that’s what games are good at, but you end up splitting the difference somewhere along the way. You have to do some exposition and you have the characters do their character moments. But whenever possible if we can offload it, plausibly, to do the environment or the experiential side, we definitely like to do that.

Putting story in the environment, in the gameplay, is tricky. The player is in a different mindset when she’s under her own control versus when that control is taken away and she’s shown a little movie. When you have agency as the player, the information you stumble across feels more personal; you get an “I found this” feeling, a feeling of ownership over the event. If you hadn’t taken that left turn back there, you never would have overheard the argument between the wife and the husband that explains why he kills her later. It’s a little burst of “gotcha,” a kind of voyeuristic excitement where you’ve gained some power over someone or something through privileged knowledge.

Film and games are both naturally voyeuristic media. In a film, you’re always watching something you otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Watch Rear Window and you’ll notice a little thrill every time Jimmy Stewart pulls out his camera to watch his neighbors. Games, too, seem to thrive when they give the player the same agency Jimmy Stewart has — to point the camera and discover something yourself. The overheard conversation in a game has more emotional stickiness than the cinematic. For example, the scene at the end of the Death Knight starting area in Wrath of the Lich King feels more epic because your avatar is “there” instead of watching through a prescribed viewport like a cinematic. Likewise, Silent Hill 4: The Room gives you story even as it removes your player agency. You seem to always be stuck in this room, but you can see out through little holes in the wall, so you learn more and more about the people around you through your choices of who to watch.

Player choice — that stumbled upon action — multiplies the emotional significance of the information. Finding lots of different ways to plant your story so it can grow in the player, I think, is the natural state of story in games.

Casey Hudson, director of the Mass Effect series, on ambition:

We find comfort in doing something that’s ambitious. […] By calling out things that are going to be amazing, we know that if we achieve those things, then we’ll do well.

Great interview by Game Informer. My favorite part: Casey used to be a mechanical engineer before he got into video games.

Gabe Newell on moving beyond the episodic model of entertainment:

“We went through the episodes phase, and now we’re going towards shorter and even shorter cycles,” Newell said in an interview published in Develop magazine issue 116.

The ‘games as a service’ credo is to create games that are platforms in themselves; content that can be rapidly reconstructed through a series of updates.

“For me, ‘entertainment as a service’ is a clear distillation of the episodic content model,” Newell added.

I think Gabe has the future of games, maybe all entertainment, pinned. Once you start thinking of games as platforms, a lot of their potential becomes obvious. Not just platforms for hats, but platforms for interwoven stories, player expression, and a whole new collaborative creative process with your audience.

Every service experience is really a platform. A fancy restaurant is a platform for building business and personal relationships. A Home Depot or a Lowe’s is a platform for adding that game room to your house. An IKEA is a platform for designing your living space.

Every good service enables the user to get what she wants out of the system. It means the game is not a self-contained unit, shipped once and forgotten. The game is a relationship with the player, one that designers will be called on to shape. And the more platform-like our games become, the more we’ll enable our players to be colleagues as well as customers, co-designers with us.

The game cannot exist without the player, the film without the viewer, the book without the reader. Entertainment has always been a relationship. I can’t wait to see what happens when we design for that relationship first.

Noel at Games from Within on game prototyping:

Without a good question, it’s too easy for a prototype to go on for a long time. You feel you’re making progress because new things are added, but you have no real sense of when to stop or when it’s done. You really have to focus on the question, ignore everything else, and be merciless in your approach.

I’m guilty of this a lot. When I get something working, I want to polish it and make it perfect. That’s a waste. You have to answer your question, then move on to the next, better question, and keep at it until the game is clear.

Chris Deleon:

A videogame is not a definition of rules, which are then enforced by the software-as-referee. A videogame is a definition of a simplified alternative reality, where what often get mislabeled as “rules” are not rules at all, but rather ways of referring to the constraints and possibilities of that artificial universe. The word “rule,” in such usage, is being used as a metaphor, and although it’s common to use the word in connection to videogames, I believe it’s a source of needless confusion to do so.

I think this concept is more prevalent in open world games and simulation games than some others, but it applies to all video games. The rules of a video game are enforced with such vigor and immediacy that they become inevitable in the same way that reality is inevitable. As Tom Bissell mentioned in the article I linked to a while ago, there is something qualitatively different between video games and analog games that, I think, makes the potential emotional experience of a video game unique amongst all experiences.

Kevin Laughlin, Alexis Brownell, and Sophia Foster-Dimino at the Gambit Game Lab are at it again to paper prototype a game of tag.

They also present a very good case study on why every game studio should include a frosted glass wall between two rooms.