April 2024

Lessons from the Wasteland: Why Amazon’s Fallout is a Great Adaptation

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By any metric – critical acclaim, viewership, or audience reaction – Amazon’s live-action Fallout series is an enormous success. Viewers, even those who weren’t previously familiar with the long-running game series, embraced the quirky fifties-inspired post-apocalyptic setting and Fallout’s signature mix of humor, over-the-top gore, and grim themes. The first season of the series is …

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Neverending Stories: Designing Games Without Goals

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One of the most important foundational elements of the design of many game genres is a clear definition of the player’s goals.  When players understand the game’s goals, it adds context to the mechanics and gives purpose to the actions they’ll take during play. The best rulebooks for the myriad of board games on my …

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Rub the Right Way: Applying Friction in Game Design

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The Game of the Moment, the one people in my circle have been talking about for the last week – both positively and negatively – is Dragon’s Dogma 2. A sequel to Capcom’s RPG cult classic, the game is currently hovering at a 57% Mixed rating on Steam. Customers have plenty of valid complaints. At …

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