Last night, on the way to the Post Mortem, I got into a discussion with my co-workers about my last post, which led to a discussion about the types of games we like. I, of course, related this all to agency theory, and started looking at things through the perspectives of what types of [...]

So, it’s been a while since I’ve made a design post, not because I’m no longer interested in design, but because I’ve been so overwhelmed with making a product, that I haven’t had much time to a) play games or b) really think about their design. But these are just excuses really, right? [...]

Edit: An executable version of Sort is now available on my site here. There are some bungs in it still, but I’m going to try to get them out soon as I develop the game past the prototype state.
Last weekend, I participated in the OLPC Game Jam, working on games that would run on [...]

Given what I’ve been talking about over the past few weeks with agency, you know I could let this latest post from our boys over at Penny Arcade go without a mention. For those of you that don’t want to read the whole things here’s a quick cut of the parts that caught my [...]

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been obsessed with Agency lately. On a 2 hour drive back from Charlottesville one day, I took all of these posts to their inevitable conclusion, and concluded a discussion that I’d had with Darius during VGXPO. During this conversation, I’d told Darius [...]

Before I get into the meat of this post, I’m going to take a minute to respond to Craig’s response. I think he’s right that “barely beatable” is definitely the wrong phrase to describe what I’m trying to get across. Generally, the idea I was going for is that agency is the reason [...]

Happy New Year! And to start off the new year right, I’ve got a nice series of posts that will be going up over the next few days. This praticular is a continuation of my previous post, where I made the assertion that difficulty is strongly tied to agency; a game that is [...]

So, I’ve proposed the theory on this blog that addictiveness of games is directly related to the amount of perceived agency present in said game. There is, of course, much more that contributes to whether or not a game is addictive or not, but I am of the opinion that perceived agency is a [...]

So, I’m finally catching up on things I probably should have read weeks and weeks ago, and I stumbled upon Warren’s excellent article in the Escapist. It’s interesting to me because I wrestled with similar issues when I began work on my thesis early in 2002. In fact, I was originally planning on [...]

Okay, I admit it. I’m partially like the people described in this post over on Lost Garden. One of the people he describes as a “fanboy” I guess, since I have no interest in being in the book or movie business, and I’m not a publisher, the only thing left is a fanboy. [...]