Features | Line Hollis

Game Change: Minigames and Narrative Arcs

March 13, 2013 / 2 comments

Often, experimental games differ from longer games by exploring a single idea in depth. Many well known art games, from Every Day the Same Dream to QWOP, use a limited set of verbs and give the player just enough time to feel their way around them. A subgenre of experimental games takes the opposite approach:…

Read more →

Morrigan stands in a castle room, fire-lit. There is a doorway behind her

Capricious Nature

August 12, 2012 / 3 comments

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 is salient for a videogame character stumbling into a typical save-the-world story. It’s also a question that lies at the…

Read more →

Naoto from Persona 4. Indigo hair, pale skin, and a sharp navy coat and hat.

Playing Hard to Get

July 29, 2012 / 2 comments

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 types can express personality. I gave these types cute little titles, like A Hard Read or High Maintenance. Of course,…

Read more →

Dakkon from Planescape: Torment. A bald man with a moustache in a plaid tunic and spiky fantasy armor, with a remarkably large sword.

Difficulty Factors as Character Traits

July 15, 2012 / 0 comments

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, and not all of them are difficult for every player. I may love both Wrex and Nami, but I’m fairly…

Read more →

Kasumi from Shira Oka, looking ornery: a pale girl with glasses and unruly blue hair, in a schoolgirl uniform.

Sweeping Exits and Offstage Lines

July 1, 2012 / 1 comment

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 figure out what the hell was going on. This being the work of Harvest Moon fans, the FAQs tended to editorialize about…

Read more →

A screenshot from Limbo, showing the protagonist pushing some boxes.

What’s the Point of Limbo?

February 14, 2012 / 5 comments

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 a PC port. When it finally came out on Steam late last year, I jumped on it. This turned out…

Read more →

A screenshot from Fallout 3. Tenpenny Tower in the distance, with the sun setting in the background.

Four Types of Videogame Tragedy

January 9, 2012 / 13 comments

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, and therefore in need of fixing. This makes it hard for a tragic ending to seem like a valid choice…

Read more →

The Wrong Ending

November 15, 2011 / 25 comments

So the blog’s been a bit on the sporadic side lately and, in all honesty, it probably will be until after Thanksgiving. My apologies! On the upside, something pretty grand has been happening while I was away. Dan Cox of Digital Ephemera, with the help of commenter Ari, has taken some rough ideas in my…

Read more →

Moral Incentives and Story Structure

October 12, 2011 / 12 comments

There are a lot of ways you can classify the structure of a story, and many of them have been applied to games in one way or another. One that caused some discussion recently is based on a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes stories in terms of the fortune of the protagonist…

Read more →

A microphone extends out in first-person view over an empty landscape.

Players Are Planners

September 27, 2011 / 0 comments

In a few recent blog posts, game critics have been tackling questions about where the borders of gaming lie. This all started with Michael Abbot’s post Games Aren’t Clocks, which argued against mechanics as the primary criteria on which to judge a game. This was quickly taken up by Dennis Scimeca in Games ARE Clocks, who proposed that…

Read more →