Archive for category Articles
What Kind of Adventure Can We Have Now?
Posted by digital love child in Articles, Reid McCarter on February 10, 2012
My Twitter feed this week has pretty much transformed into a Double Fine IV drip. Each day has given me a steady supply of information on the studio, first regarding Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson offering to fund a Psychonauts sequel, and second, a Kickstarter campaign designed to let users fund a new, traditional adventure game. While the former development is currently being hashed out in private (or may be dead? I don’t know), the latter has reached a very public conclusion less than a day after its appearance: Double Fine will be making an adventure game again.
All of this begs the question of what kind of place a new entry to the antiquated genre — even one developed by some of the masters of the form — would have in today’s climate?
Taking Some of the Game Out of Videogame Sex
Posted by digital love child in Articles, Reid McCarter on January 19, 2012
There’s a healthy amount of debate occurring in games criticism right now about how far the concept of gamification* should be implemented into our daily lives. It’s a rich topic that is as much about human psychology as it is about videogame theory — and one that much smarter people than I have already spent a lot of time intelligently discussing.
I’d rather try to look at it in a different way.
Not very long ago, sex was one of the big taboos in mainstream games. Although hyper-violent titles were slapped with an M rating and sent on their way to be readily devoured by audiences, trying to implement sex was frowned upon in general. This isn’t surprising. The North American entertainment model has always been quicker to accept violent content than sexual material, and videogames, a younger medium, have unfortunately followed suit. But as the main demographic of game players has moved away from kids and teenagers to a wider audience made up of varying age groups, the viability of sex as a game element has grown. This is just fine — except, sex in games still isn’t being handled properly.
