mass effect | Line Hollis

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…

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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…

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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…

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Dragon Age 2: The Champion of Kirkwall

August 20, 2011 / 0 comments

It took me a long time, but I finally finished my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2. This is the first of a couple posts I’ll be writing on it. To get the overall opinion stuff out of the way first, I was pretty crazy about the game. I wasn’t too offended by the reused…

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Conversation in Games: Trigger, Branch, Repeat

April 23, 2010 / 11 comments

Bento Smile’s Air Pressure Why is there so little variety in conversation systems in games? Conversation is one of the most essential and frequent things humans do. It is a common source of interest, drama, and comedy in both real life and fiction. It reveals character, it advances plotlines, and it uncovers information. It’s hugely…

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