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.

Their distance attacks can inflict amazingly dangerous status ailments that could conceivably result in Shiren dying before he gets to make another decision. With careful play this can be negated mostly, but there is still a chance on the last wide-open level that the player could face a situation he cannot escape.2. "No cyanide rule" No unidentified item should be immediately fatal upon use given reasonable circumstances, otherwise the player should never try to use-identify.Example: In Rogue, probably the worst item is the potion of blindness, which makes the game nearly unplayable. Not only does it give all spaces on the level a vision range even worse than that of dark passages, it is impossible to find secret doors while blind, and the state has a good chance of stranding the player until the blindness wears off or he drinks a potion of extra healing.

But there is no ring of blindness, because for such an item to have bite it must be initially cursed, and if the player put on a cursed ring of blindness he might not have any means of curse lifting available, and if that were true and he was blocked from the exit by a secret passage he would be doomed to starve. The effect would be to make it unwise to try to test-identify rings because of the chance of death. One might qualify this by saying it'd be unwise to test-ID rings if no means of curse removal were available, but considering all curse-lifting in that game is from random sources it might be considered unreasonable.Example: In Nethack, there is a random item that can kill in normal situations just from ordinary use: the Amulet of Strangulation. However, it is a delayed death, and prayer can get the player out of it. But what if the player has recently prayed and his timeout hasn't expired?