Rachel Helps

Selling a videogame idea on Kickstarter is a test of any studio’s marketing ability. But once a project is funded, the finished product is most backers’ main concern. UnSubject decided to look through how many videogame Kickstarters have delivered a final game. The answer so far: about a third.  It’

The holidays and traditional gift-giving occasions are coming up, and soon we’ll be caught up in listing all the things we want. As a child, saving up money to buy things was one of my passions in life; getting stuff was a way to show I fit in with society and had taste. I still get excited about ne

The game Create claims to measure player creativity and reward you for it. But according to Eddy Léja-Six, this game measures creativity by looking at how many of the available tools players use in a given level.  The game features special challenges called “Create Chains”: the player is rewarded fo

Paige Johnson is always looking for unusual playground motifs at her blog Playscapes. This time she’s found turtles in playground design around the world. The above picture comes from Mongolia; below is a turtle fountain from South Korea. Maybe turtles’ general harmlessness makes them a good compani

In Indie Game: The Movie, several developers mention how their intended audience is themselves. Nabokov also claimed, “I write for myself in multiplicate.”  Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves starts off with the dedication, “This is not for you.” The developer of the protest game In a Permanent Save

In an effort to attract more customers, Star Wars: The Old Republic went free-to-play last week. Wired’s Andrew Groen argues that the MMORPG’s game’s design is obsolete; constantly making new content for an MMO is too expensive. In my opinion, it’s not just too expensive, but relies too much on what

If you’ve used an instant messaging client, you’ve probably run across chatbots who can talk about almost anything with a weird combination of factoids and social failure. One app for iOS presents a twitter-searching chatbot as your boyfriend, resulting in weird and hilarious conversations. Mattie B

If you look around in Portal, you can see the graffiti from previous “test subjects” warning you not to trust GLaDOS. While Portal‘s treatment of environmental storytelling is pretty simple, the upcoming game Gone Home takes these aspects of narrative design and zeros in on it. The first-person expl

The best thing about the Paper Mario series is its bizarre sense of humor. Sure you’re saving the world, but the boss fights are against characters with weaknesses other than fire or ice. The newest game in the series, Paper Mario: Stick Star for 3DS, goes back to its turn-based combat roots. Jason

A good free-to-play game is a little like a religion. The gameplay has you coming back every day to perform rituals for an abstract goal, and sometimes a little money can help you reach that goal faster. Wait, that last one only counts for influencing mortals. Buying or selling positions of influenc

It’s the start of flu season, and in my book, that means lots of pain medication for sinus inflammation. In an effort to teach the masses about pain management, London’s Science Museum made a game about what makes pain go away. Use too many painkillers and you’ll develop a tolerance, but spam those

The board game Guess Who? only has five girls to choose from. If you’re a little girl playing against your older brother, you’ll probably always choose a girl and always lose. Jennifer O’Connell’s six-year-old daughter wrote to Hasbro to find out why such unfairness exists in the world:  I think it’

With all the Kickstarters and new projects coming out, it can be easy to overlook how an experiment actually turned out. Not all projects are completed or make lots of money. Sadly, the imaginative flash-based MMO Glitch is nearing its end. Last year, the browser-based MMO Glitch launched, boasting

Part of what makes losing a game acceptable to me is that I haven’t lost any money losing. The only thing to lose is my pride, and even then, most games have an element of chance to blame losses on. But for some people, a game is only exciting if the stakes are high. With Virgin gaming’s multiplayer

With all this videogame shooting going on let’s not forget that some games are doing an excellent job of being cute. LittleBigPlanet Karting has the racing style of a generic karting game, but the minigames and unique visual style we’ve come to expect from the series. Ryan Smith at Gameological does

This news segment from the 90s looks at the NEAT SPECS of the Super Nintendo and how some parents feel their children are being exploited by marketing. Sound familiar? Maybe some things haven’t changed, though Nintendo no longer controls “80% of the video market.”

The Odyssey isn’t just a story. It’s Odysseus retelling this story of the adventures he undertook. True to the nature of the epic poem, Odysseus takes poetic license with details. At Play the Past, Roger Travis argues that players of Halo 4 have a similar retelling each time they pass through the ga

Instead of talking about the games you like, Local No. 12’s Metagame asks you to discuss the games you disliked or felt “meh” about. The comparisons Metagame makes aren’t just “which is better,” but specific questions like “which is more tragic?” Nico Dicecco at Medium Difficulty articulates how the

The level editor for Portal 2, Puzzle Maker, is suprisingly easy to use. It reduces the many variables involved in a Portal level to a few intuitive controls. The game also helps players use their intuitive understanding of physics to solve puzzles. Educators loved it, and there are already lots of

Halo 4 and Black Ops II are out this month, causing us to reflect on the appeal of first-person shooters. I tend to dismiss them, as I’m not a fan of shooting things without understanding them, but there’s no denying the adrenaline rush from a competitive multiplayer win. Stephen Totilo at The New Y

The promotions for Assassin’s Creed III made much of its Native American protagonist, but the game starts with a lengthy (and as our reviewer found, intolerable) prelude playing his British father. While a few applauded this contextual approach as necessary in hindsight, most players found it slow,

You’ve played the polished levels that have been iteratively playtested; where you don’t get lost and you know exactly what you’re supposed to do. Some might consider this too obvious for a game, but in the world of architecture, this is precisely what buildings need. In an article about how neurosc

The release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II is today. As it’s set in 2025, developer Treyarch wanted some help making a believable, yet “cool” futuristic shooter. Yannick LeJacq at the Wall Street Journal talked with the game’s military consultant, Peter Singer, about his role in helping develop the n

So you’re walking around in Skyrim or Magicka or one of these medieval fantasy games, and there are lots of fires, and plenty of wooden furniture around these fires that seems to be perpetually flame retardant. Jeremy Antley at Play the Past reflected on these little inconsistencies, especially the