Humans and Games: my new blog about game design and culture

[ella guro]

For awhile I've been meaning to put the thoughts I have floating around in my head into some sort of coherent form. Now that I'm not doing a lot with my life right now, I thought now was a good time to start doing this. Here's the link:

http://humansandgames.blogspot.com/

Blogger isn't the best, but I'm doing it for now until I can find an alternative. The first article is up, it's called "DOOM and What Videogames Are Trying To Tell Us". It's rather long, so I won't paste it here. In it I talk about my feelings about DOOM and then my general feelings on the state of the games industry and game design now. I also talk about games as art and games as compared with movies. There's a lot of ideas in it and it's been an investment of a lot of time, passion and energy from me, so please read if you can post here on or in the blog if you have any comments.

I'll update this thread whenever I post a new article. thanks!

- Liz

[Scrobble]

oh, cool, you got it going.

[prophetik music]

interesting stuff, liz. i think your comment about how DOOM doesn't exist in the rational world, but the corners of your imagination, is a pretty heady thought - would never have come up with that on my own.

[Schwaltzvald]

Good read nonetheless!

[ella guro]

Thanks guys! I appreciate the comments a lot. The article is partly about DOOM, but the bigger point is mostly in the second and third sections.

Anyway, I think I'm gonna start another article today, this time about the "language" of game design. I'll bump this thread when it's posted.

[ella guro]

One last annoying bump for awhile: I rewrote little bits of the article, mostly making grammar corrections and improving flow. So if you read it now it's a little bit different than how it was before.

[Strike911]

You know, I came in here expecting just another humdrum personal blog page, but then I read your DOOM entry and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of what you posted. Really cool stuff. I'll definitely be checking back in from time to time.

[Schwaltzvald]

Blogger isn't the best, but I'm doing it for now until I can find an alternative.

Ever considered Wordpress..?

[ZealPath]

Have to say I really enjoyed reading this, the Doom stuff really resonated with me. Maybe I had thought about Doom like that before, but mostly subconsciously, and to hear your take on it both brought back a lot of memories but also made me think of how often I would think about just how weird yet how perfect the world of Doom was. I was maybe a couple years older than you when I first played it, and I can still very much remember how absorbed I could become in what is really such a simple game.

It was that very lack of explanation, yet the obvious fact that you were slowly working your way into Hell itself that made the original Doom so much more of an immersive experience than Doom 3, which still had great atmosphere but too much contact with "the real world," to convey that sense of complete isolation and desperation that the original game, and for the most part, Doom 2 had. Reading that also made me want to listen to Asphyxiated Soul again for that dose of the desperate and scary Doom experience that it provides so well.

To hear you mention Braid also brought a smile to my face, as I think it's probably the best game to come out in the last few years. and the main reason why it's so good in my mind is once again, the fact that not only is your hand not held, very little info is provided aside from the fact that you can jump and rewind time. You have to think, mostly outside the box, and the game itself is for the most part, a lot of just sitting there staring at the puzzles saying what the hell do I do now, and that sense of accomplishment that comes when you finally figure it out. To look up how to finish a game like this would be a complete waste of the experience, and I wonder how many people felt the same as they played it.

In any case, I look forward to more entries, very interesting and thought-provoking stuff!

[lazygecko]

I love Doom. The reason Doom is so great, and continues to be so great today, is precisely because of its more abstract, arcade-like design. There is another really great article on Doom you can read here:

http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74

It's great knowing I'm not alone in appreciating what makes Doom (and its siblings) unique. There seems to be more likeminded people coming out of their shells in today's ultra commercial, blockbuster-wannabe FPS market. The genre has truly lost something in its transition.

[prophetik music]

something i'd appreciate is the addition of an RSS feed. dunno if blogger supports it, but wordpress does, at least.

[ella guro]

I might be switching to wordpress anyway, since I've had some problems with blogger and my landlord (in his infinite niceness) bought out the domain name humansandgames.com (which did redirect to my site but seems to not right now).

[ella guro]

I just made a new post. This one's in response to the Extra Credits video about game music, and then goes on to talk about what I like and what's unique about older game music and how it compares to newer game music.

Here's a link:

Re: Extra Credits and the world of game music

I'm also gonna work on getting a wordpress account and moving this stuff over there, I'll keep you guys updated.