We make stories in video games because, probably, something about the idea of a participatory medium entices us. How do we involve the player in the story we’re telling? Video games are not unique in being a participatory (or ‘interactive’) story medium, but it is one of the interesting things…

(An introduction to this series can be found here) (Part 1, Part 2) This is the third and final lecture that I gave to my Narrative Design class. In this lecture we focused on what narrative design decisions actually look like, mostly in preparation for the students’ last assignment. Because…

(An introduction to this series can be found here) (Part 1) Most of this lecture is really meant to be interactive — the interesting thing here is not what I have to say about these games, but the things that the students notice, or don’t, and how the conversation goes…

(If you haven’t read the introduction to this series here, it will offer some valuable context).

A few months ago, I was contacted by someone from Futuregames, a game development school here in Stockholm, who was looking for an instructor for a Narrative Design course. I had taught at Futuregames before — I did a short course in using Perforce to help the students with their…

Today marks five years since Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was first released, on PC (to be followed later by versions on Playstation, Xbox, and Switch). …

Having failed to learn any lessons at all from my last postmortem, I’d like to talk about the experience of developing and releasing the Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking on Steam. The Museum is a collection of lockpicking minigames drawn from videogame history — from 1989’s Hillsfar to 2019’s Jenny LeClue…

In one of my past lives, and one of my alternate futures, I was an AI programmer. On BioShock 2 and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified I made various splicers and aliens do what they should do. It was all state machines and behaviors, but what I really got excited about…

This is not about advice for getting your game discovered! This is a philosophical argument against the way the platform works right now. I’ll preface this by saying that I am not the most knowledgeable person on this topic, and I’m sure I’ll get some things wrong. This is all…