It's impossible to know how 'fun' a game will be.
— Jason Schreier
Unraveling the threads of a good game story is like solving a well-crafted puzzle. After a lengthy, sometimes difficult journey, the pieces click into place, and you're rewarded with the satisfying payoff of a job well done.
As a massively multiplayer online RPG, 'The Old Republic' has no single-player components; you cooperate with and compete against other people in a virtual, persistently online recreation of the 'Star Wars' universe.
Game ideas on Kickstarter have found loads of success, even when they're not as unusual as 'BlindSide.'
Like any good RPG, 'Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning' is adept at digging its claws into that part of your brain that just loves accomplishing things.
I've always been in favor of drastic transparency, radical transparency.
I think the most insidious version of crunch is when you say, 'Hey, I'm working for this triple-A video game; I personally want it to be as good as possible, so I'm going to stay tonight until 10 P.M. to finish this feature.'
I think there's this tradition of a culture of NDAs that has spanned all the way back to the '70s and '80s when game developers where very paranoid about cloning and people copying one another's ideas and business sabotage.
Between 'The Godfather,' 'The Sopranos,' 'Goodfellas,' and the countless other mob stories that have been both critically and commercially acclaimed over the years, it's not hard to see why a game like 'Mafia Wars' works.
A great JRPG captures that feeling of going on an unusual adventure, of bringing a ragtag group of heroes from famine to fortune or steering cold-hearted villagers away from indifference.
After the mediocre 'Final Fantasy XIII' and the sheer disaster that was 'Final Fantasy XIV,' many fans have lost faith in the RPG titan.
As someone who has been playing 'Final Fantasy' since before I could walk on two legs, I was particularly disgusted by 'Final Fantasy XIII-2's soundtrack.
One of the best games to play with a significant other is Nintendo's 'Super Mario Maker,' for the Wii U, which lets you build and play your own Mario courses.
Modern video games like 'Mass Effect' and 'Uncharted' cost tens of millions of dollars and require the labor of hundreds of people, who can each work 80- or even 100-hour weeks.
Though many of Obsidian's games have featured wry, sardonic humor, the developer has stuck to more serious fantasy and sci-fi themes.
Music has always been an important part of the 'Final Fantasy' series. The popular role-playing games have typically featured catchy, eclectic soundtracks filled with beautiful orchestrated melodies.
For inexperienced, small developers, getting funding from big game publishers can be a Sisyphean task.
One of the successes of Kickstarter is that it takes the guesswork out of greenlighting games. Publishers of larger games have to carefully choose which titles they publish, lest they lose a bunch of money on a quirky game that doesn't sell. Kickstarter is all reward, no risk, since nobody has to pay if the project isn't completely funded.
Amalur's user interface is designed much like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, liberally sprinkling yellow exclamation points and markers all over your mini-map in order to show you where to quest next.
Why would it matter to anybody if a game developer talks about a project that they worked on ten years ago that was canceled? It really bums me out to think about how many of those games have been lost to time.
One of the interesting things I've found is that crunch is the result of crunch culture rather than the result of managers coming and saying, 'Okay, we've gotta work overtime.'
Most strikingly, 'World of Warcraft' allows you to live a veritable second life. Girls can pretend to be boys; boys can pretend to be girls; human accountants can pretend to be elven mages.
Scrabble has always been immensely popular, so it's easy to see why online Scrabble is just as lauded.
Gamers have this tendency to turn games into mathematical equations, breaking them into lists of components like 'presentation' and 'mechanics' and judging each one on its own merits.
There was once a time when 'Final Fantasy' meant greatness, when seeing Square's brand on a game box meant you were about to play something special. That time has long since passed.
Chris Ferguson brought up a really interesting point that I agree with, and he said science is a human endeavor. The more someone tells me that they're absolutely objective, the less I believe they are. So people need to fact-check things. They need to understand that science is easily damaged by politics and personal opinion.
To avoid long-term deleterious effects, game developers must commit to stop facilitating a culture in which crunch is the norm. The occasional long night or weekend at the office can be useful and even exhilarating, but as a constant, it is damaging.
Among video game developers, it's called 'crunch': a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family and even food.
The puzzle of 'To the Moon' is both elegant and memorable. Take a few hours and try to solve it. The pieces fit together oh so nicely.
It can sometimes feel like the commercials for Activision's 'Call of Duty' series are always on. If the publisher has its way, the games will be, too.
Kickstarter can get customers invested, both literally and figuratively, in a game before it is released. With nothing but an idea, a bit of video and a few screenshots, a developer can start building a loyal fan base.
In 'Amalur,' each person believes he has an immutable destiny, one that defines how, and how long, he will live. Until you come along. But of course, your character is the anomaly, somebody who can change both his own fate and the destinies of the people he interacts with. So, naturally, it's up to you to save the world.
If people are more civil about games, that'd make me super happy.
There are so many canceled games that people don't know about and so many stories people can't tell because they're restricted by this ridiculous culture of secrecy.
I think there's that widespread sentiment that game developers need to be quiet unless they're talking on-message. I think that's changing a little bit; Twitter has helped, with developers sharing personal opinions on things.
Sure, when you think 'World of Warcraft,' you might picture the nerdier set - those who may have sacrificed hygiene and sleep to reach one more experience level. But the truth is that 'WoW' is populated with players of all sorts of backgrounds, from rural housewives to NFL punters.
When gamers look at games not as overall experiences but as chimeric potpourris of sight and sound, we take too mechanical a perspective and ignore what really makes them special.
It's easy to think of a role-playing game as an amalgamation of two main components, narrative and gameplay, jammed together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, they fit together nicely; other times, they're as awkward and frustrating as that one weirdly-shaped 'Tetris' block that always falls into the gap where you need an L.
While 'Final Fantasy XIII-2' does quite a bit to fix the mistakes of its predecessor, it does very little to stand out on its own merits.
What Brad Bushman did is in 2010 he ran what's called a meta-analysis, which is an analysis that looks at a whole bunch of different studies. They concluded that, yes, there is a link between violent video games and aggression.
Most game developers in the United States do not receive extra compensation for extra hours.
