The Princess, the Plastic Guitar, and the Hook Shot

Game require us to learn pretty curious things: how to time a jump precisely, whether to watch TV or study a book on cleaning, how to navigate a three-dimensional space by using teleportation, and so on. We would not learn these skills if we did not have a good reason to, or at least a perceived reason to. Some games do teach us valuable skills we can use in real life, but most games will be regarded by non-gamers and grumpy seniors as a “waste of time”. When playing however, it suddenly becomes vital information that some tubes are inhabited by fire-breathing plants, and then learning how to avoid these plants. Since many skills taught by games are too abstract or removed from reality to appear applicable in daily life, each time a player learns something, he needs some kind of motivation that gives the skills value, or the learning will not be regarded as fun.

A post about narratives in games.

Over the last week, I have read (too) many blog posts, studies, opinion pieces et cetera about narratives in video games. I figured that it would be nice if I actually wrote down my thoughts on the matter before a couple of days pass and I forget everything.

Risk Analysis: Conclusion, sort of

The series of atrociously boring posts is finally over. While I can’t say the analysis was very in depth or interesting, it got me thinking and writing on quite a few different topics. Hopefully this arduous analysis will yield some interesting topics to discuss in future posts. In addition, it got me used to a regular (well, almost) blogging schedule. I can only hope I have not scared away a potential reader with my apparent obsession with Risk.