No longtime gamer has failed to notice how much easier video games are nowadays compared to their early days. The New York Times Magazine recently speculated that today’s easier video games may be a reaction to the increasing difficulty and chaos of modern life. More to the point, we can Read more…
Many years ago, more than half a lifetime by now, I took my first steps into gamer girl territory. Except I didn’t really see it as being a gamer girl. To me, I was simply a gamer, full stop. Now that we’re nearly at the 40-year anniversary of the classic Read more…
Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
It’s not your imagination: games really have gotten easier over the years. The reason has everything to do with my generation’s fear of failure, and our need to get payoffs we can’t get in real life.
Excessive nerfing can lead to an erosion of trust in the playerbase. It hits at the heart of our sense of fairness. And perhaps more than anything else, gamers want games to be fair—or at least skewed in their favor.
In gaming as in real life, teamwork skills matter. When one player didn’t get the memo, the game master makes the kick.
Imagine this: It’s the 6th century. You’re a peasant toiling in the fields outside of Constantinople. It’s a mean and simple life. Most of what you see, all day every day, is dirt. But four times a year, you make the trek into town to the Hagia Sophia, the center Read more…
Hi and welcome back! Over the years, I’ve played and administered a whole bunch of games — both in real life and online. In that time, as you might expect, I’ve encountered my fair share of absolutely awful gamers. But there’s one kind of gamer who just takes the cake Read more…
Permadeath is a gaming term that means that once a character dies, that’s it: they’re gone forever. I still remember the first time I ever heard about it and played a game that featured it. And life sure does look different–and better–when one looks at it from a permadeath perspective.
Ever met one of those people who with one sentence changes the whole way you conceptualize something? Today I want to tell you about a couple of times that’s happened to me and what resulted from those shifts in mindset. I’ve told y’all that I used to admin on MUDs, Read more…