Since Duels of the Planeswalkers launched a week ago, I’ve donated a few bucks and more than a few hours to Wizards of the Coast and Microsoft. Good friends and I joined in to play this latest digital incarnation of Magic: the Gathering. It’s not often that I take the chance to play CCGs anymore, [...]

This has trial balloon written all over it. Advertisers and creative designers will soon have more artistic freedom to turn campaigns on Xbox Live into interactive and interconnected experiences reaching far beyond technology for television, Sean Alexander, director at Microsoft’s Advertising Business Group, said Monday. Personally, I don’t much care. Navigating the XBox Live experience [...]

So how can we fix or, with more modest ambition, improve moral choices in games? My goal would be to encourage players to treat moral decisions as any other game decision, instead of opportunity to slide a progress bar. Choice gets more interesting when different choices have things to recommend them. There’s value in the player weighing long-term vs short-term [...]

A bit of history. In imitating the pen and paper game, Dungeons & Dragons-like video games have long exposed an alignment field. This was a text field without game consequence. Making choices that could affect the game or character’s moral status is a more recent phenomena. Knights of the Old Republic (2003) pops into mind [...]

I want to talk about moral choices in games, but before I get there, I need to take apart choice in general. Don’t worry, we won’t get burdened with issues of free will or invent terminology for ludoethics. Metaethics would be a different blog. Games demand decisions. Every act of the player, every input and [...]

If you haven’t played it, inFamous is a platform-shooter. It replaces firearms with electic powers that are indistinguishable from shooter gameplay, right down to the controls. So it’s Crackdown on the PS3 with updated art, though the art does not approach the best graphics that the PS3 we’ve seen. I like the comic book-style cinematics, [...]

I’ve been playing a lot of inFamous, and I enjoy the game a great deal… thus the hours of time in front of the PS3. But there’s something missing. This is superhero game, and quite simply, I don’t feel like a hero. (Actually, I’m playing evil, but nevermind.) When I surf the power lines, I [...]

I’ve seen people say that Natal is a hoax, that it doesn’t or can’t work. Sorry, it is for real. The demos at E3 were not smoke and mirrors.Many developers have seen and tested it, and the accuracy with which Natal tracks your movements is uncanny. I look forward us getting our devkit. But Natal [...]

A great day for hearing from coworkers and friends how awesome this is. I don’t care that I had nothing to do with the trailer and have very little to do with the game, it’s enough to be playing the game before… you. No, I can’t help you with alpha or beta access, go away. [...]