The decisions he writes about can be applied to almost any videogame.A Destructoid writer going by the name of "AwesomeExMachina" (awesome name, I know) writes about his challenging experience of playing through Grand Theft Auto IV as a nice Nico Bellic. He describes the unique challenges he faced by playing through the game in a way that the developers never intended.Nick LaLone on Before Game Design writes about the choices developers make leading up to the creation of female videogame characters.

In his piece, he deconstructs NieR's Kaine -- a female character possessed by a male demon and describes the character as both "intersexed" and "transgendered."Jamie Madigan at the Psychology of Games blog attempts to answer the question as to why gamers wax nostalgic over old games -- through science! He writes: "The link between negative moods and nostalgia also came up when the researchers looked at what triggers bouts of the emotion. They found that feeling down in the dumps or displeasure over current circumstances is likely to prompt people to reminisce about some uplifting experience in the past."Finally, Mitch Krpata skewers videogame writing in his piece on Insult Swordfighting by asking readers to match each of the year's ten most popular games with a quotation from its review..

It's an article that talks about the ludonarrative dissonance in games like BioShock and the Uncharted series and how these games address incongruancies.Adam Ruch has written the second part of his "Metanarrative of Videogames" article on the FlickeringColours blog. He questions the industry's focus on the "win state" in games, and asks why they can't strive to evoke a wider variety of emotions from players beyond thatSalman Rushdie weighs in on videogames and the future of storytelling, comparing the freeform storytelling of Red Dead Redemption and other games with Jorge Luis Borges' short story, The Garden of Forking Paths.

James Bishop at Hellmode picks apart the morality and karma systems of Fallout: New Vegas, and asks why the simplified morality in games fails to reflect the ambiguity of real situations: "Game designers have been telling us what is good and what is evil within the context of video games for years, often ignoring the various complexities of situations and generalizing on a large scale. This can sometimes be conflated with the distinction between problems and choices, but virtually every known karma system functions in the same manner; a point on a line that shifts from light to dark, good to bad, paragon to renegade."On Wired's Game|Life blog, Jason Schreier investigates Game Dev Story's addictive qualities as a simulation and its realistic portrayal of game development through his interview with the game's creator Ron Gilbert.Dan C. of the Lost Garden blog has an in-depth article on a game he's worked on called Steambirds: Survival. He writes about the choices that were made during its development, specifically the decision to remove handcrafted levels, which he argues decreases the depth and replay value of a game.

They never got tiresome it was never a case of oh great, just what we need another cutscene It is part of the experience and what makes this instance any different from something like a criticallyadored Telltale game is beyond me. It isn't the longest game in the world, but it feels like a complete package. It's short enough that it leaves you gladly willing to want to play it again. It respects your time and doesn't dither or pad out We both played the game simultaneously, and both of us completed it in something like 7.5 hours.

No idea how on earth anyone could have completed it in five hours. Yes, 7.5 hours still isn't the longest game in the world, but it feels like a complete package. It's short enough that it leaves you gladly willing to want to play it again. It respects your time and doesn't dither or pad out with pointless missions and inconsequential content, like so many games do. Game length and game quality are two completely separate ideals. Buy Runescape GoldThe Last of Us is globally recognised as one of the best games ever made, yet its 1520 hour run time means I m unlikely to want to jump to play it again in a hurry. At about half of that, The Order: 1886 is something I can gladly soak up in the course of a couple of evenings. The gameplay of The Order was surprisingly enjoyable.