RSS Bilingual Reader

Chapter 12: The Harmony of the World

The idea of being in the body of a guy and making love to his wife — when she believes you’re her husband, even though you’re not — was a very strange position to be in. That’s exactly the kind of thing I try to explore in all my games today. — David Cage, speaking from the Department of WTF The French videogame auteur David Cage has been polarizing critics and gamers for more than a quarter-century with his oddly retro-futurist vision of the medium. He believ...

This article tells part of the story of real-time strategy . The first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game, those two genres that had come to absolutely dominate mainstream computer gaming by the end of the 1990s, were surprisingly different in their core technologies. The FPS was all about 3D graphics, as aided and abetted by the new breed of hardware-accelerated 3D cards that seemed to be getting more powerful — and also more expensive — almost by the month. A generation...

This article tells part of the story of post-commercial interactive fiction . After fighting the tendency for decades, I’ve finally learned to accept that I’m a bit of a conservative, if not a downright Luddite, when it comes to my interactive fiction — or my text adventures, as I still persist in calling them. Despite its name, parser-based interactive fiction doesn’t actually strike me as all that good at plot-heavy storytelling. What it does excel at is setting. And th...