Capricious Nature
The Futile Rebellions of Fereldan Do you accept the role given to you, or do you try to escape it? Even when you try, can you escape the way your role shaped you? The question…
Author Archives: linehollis
Playing Hard to Get
I have not been fully honest with you. I’ve put off addressing an elephant in the room, and it’s got to do with objectification. In my last post, I talked about the ways that different…
Difficulty Factors as Character Traits
If difficulty is one of the things a game can use to make characters interesting, it’s worth asking just what difficulty communicates. For one thing, difficulty isn’t just one-dimensional. There are different kinds of difficulty,…
Sweeping Exits and Offstage Lines
I spent a long time trying to figure out Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. It had an unusually deep simulation with a lot of random variables, so I dug through a lot of FAQs to…
Difficult Personalities
Every medium has its own ways of expressing character. Novels have internal monologues and an unmatched power to convey a character’s inner life. Theatre has body language, voice, and physical presence; film has the close-up…
Tell Me Some Stories about Morrigan
Sometimes when I’m working on a piece and want to get out of my own head, I’ll open up a question on Twitter on some subject. This usually yields great stuff, but it’s stuck in…
New Stuff Imminent
Just a heads up that there’ll be some new content here come July. I’m going to try out a slightly new format, where I set a theme each month and write a few short or…
What’s the Point of Limbo?
Since its release on XBox Live Arcade in 2010, Limbo has racked up awards and generated a substantial amount of critical writing. I didn’t have XBox Live when it came out, so I’ve been waiting on…
I Am Bad at Interactive Fiction.
Here’s the thing about interactive fiction. I approve of it in theory. A genre with no graphics and huge freedom of interaction seems like the perfect platform for narrative experiments. I love Stephen Lavelle’s work…
Four Types of Videogame Tragedy
In my last post on tragedy, The Wrong Ending, I presented what I saw as an essential problem of tragedy in videogames: an ending where things go badly is often seen by players as wrong,…