Last week, I spent a few hours going down the rabbit-hole that is experimenting with interactive fiction. This is a rabbit-hole that I do go down every once in a while, because I catch myself longing for a game to play that has a specific set of features (turn-based/not action, “quality” stemming not from difficulty but from story or general fun vibe, builds up complexity over time …
A role-playing game (RPG) is a game where a player takes the role of a character within the game universe, and takes actions as that character in order to try to beat the game. I’m mostly familiar with single-player RPGs you can play on a computer (browser games or video games) but the genre itself existed before computer games did; at that time it took the form of tabletop RPGs (which still …
Turn-based RPGs are a sub-genre of RPG where gameplay is conducted in turns (player turns, certainly, and sometimes also enemy turns). I’m mostly familiar with the single-player kind you play on a computer (browser games or video games) but I believe the mechanic has its origins in (usually multiplayer) tabletop RPGs. The subgenre forms absolutely one of my favourite types of games to play, …
“Browser games” is a term for games on the Internet that can be played through an ordinary web browser. Their “heyday” was probably the 2000s, as in the 2010s mobile games came into existence and captured a lot of the market of “people who want something casual to play in short bursts in between other things”. That said, there are still a lot of browser games …
Interactive fiction is a genre of games which is largely text- and story-based. There are two main subtypes of interactive fiction: parser games, where a player has to type instructions into the game (e.g. “examine bottle”, “go north”) and gamebooks (a.k.a. choice games, or choose-your-own-adventures), where a player chooses what to do out of a list of author-provided …
This was such a great article, and having a physical disability myself (limited mobility in my right arm) I found a lot in here to relate to.
There are sooooo many games that I’d love to play, but they require quick reflexes and a level of dexterity that I don’t think is possible one-handed. Pretty much any action game rules itself out for me, even though there are a ton I would have liked to play – action platformers like Hollow Knight, action roguelikes like Dead Cells, and innumerable action RPGs. I’ve also never really been able to play console games (except games with motion controls, which was mainly a thing in the Nintendo Wii era…) because controllers require two fully-functional hands. Actually, through this article I’ve now discovered that accessibility controllers exist, which expands my options a little.
I also liked the point, though, that the gatekeeping about “games shouldn’t offer ‘story modes’ that let you skip the hard stuff or make it easier because it’s contrary to the intent of the game” is a toxic attitude. It’s bad for disabled gamers but also bad for like, newbie or casual gamers who just wanna experience a game everyone else is talking about. In the past I’ve played some turn-based strategy games where even the easiest mode is impossibly difficult, and I just… don’t like it. I get that it’s a genre that mostly attracts people who do like it, but I don’t see how those people would lose anything from the existence of a beatable “easy mode” alongside harder modes. I don’t want to waste hundreds of hours on repetitive content I keep failing at when I could go play something that’s actually fun, lol. Give people the choice! 👏
Great piece on the conflict between archivists and video game publishers to preserve the old games they don’t feel like selling any more. The issue’s particularly relevant now because Nintendo is shutting down their Wii U and 3DS stores. If the corporations get their way (and so far they’re seeming to), a lot of gaming history will be lost.
Thought this was cool! 16yo students created a game played with voice commands to teach their language, Arrernte 😃
Wordle is a simple word game, played in the browser (see: browser games), that is the major fad on social media at time of writing (January 2022).
As this NYT article describes, Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, who was aiming to create a simple word game that’d entertain his partner. She had input too, going through the initial list of 12,000 …
Kingdom of Loathing is a largely text-based browser RPG, started in 2003 by Zack Johnson (“Jick”). It started out as something of a satire of RPGs, and has largely kept its irreverent, reference-based humour to this day, but it’s also a mechanically interesting turn-based RPG in its own right where basically you try to optimise your use of various limited …
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.