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No Man's Sky is a perplexing game. It plays out like a slowly unraveling mystery in both gameplay mechanics and narrative. Ignoring the vast majority of the pre-release hype, the game appealed to my taste for exploration and the basic gameplay loop is relaxing enough to pair with the interstelllar exploration goal that takes up the bulk of the game. Cool Ghosts produced an analysis of No Man's Sky that I largely agree with. This game however is like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series in that your mileage may vary. Buying in to the world is far more of a necessity in NMS than it is in a Bethesda game, but the concept is the same. That being said, Sean Murray is captain of a mysterious and terribly frustrating ship. I have no idea what to expect in terms of support for the game in the form of content patches or DLC. I have grown tired of the current iteration of NMS. I have little to no respect for absolute silence, all I need is a single tentative timeline talking about what...

I'm going to outline a few scenarios that do not absolutely  require instruction, but good instruction makes these situations far more worthwhile: Learning Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for the first (or first in a long while) time. Not just learning about disciplines like chemistry, physics, and statistics as a base for understanding natural phenomena, but directly applying them. Learning a creative art-making skill such as sketching with charcoal or learning how to do 3D modelling. Interlocking Morasses D&D is a morass of systems that interact with one another in order to develop a coherent story from the combination of three things: the motivations of its players (including the Dungeon Master), the statistics and attributes of its characters, and the resolution of conflict through randomness via dice rolling. Clearly they influence each other outside of the probability space where dice determine the outcome, if you don't attack the guard you won'...

Any community that is focused on a creative task is a great opportunity for learning life skills to do with cooperation and productivity. As a wee lad, I got dangerously deep into Warcraft III and its expansion The Frozen Throne. I played for probably thousands of hours and spent a a good amount of time in its modding tools. I produced very little playable content but learned a great deal about the logic of computer programming, the artistry of textures in video games, and how to overcome limitations like low-poly models. Having to learn about these topics and having experiences with them allowed me to participate in communities and learn about skill-building in incredibly formative ways. Classic Warcraft III. How I remember it. Limitations like low-poly models are really not that big of a deal in a real-time strategy game like Warcraft III. The more polygons you have, the more points of data are used to define the features of a three dimensional shape. Generally, you can j...

Designing a setting for a campaign is a rather daunting task. You can take several approaches to this, with one end of the spectrum being insanely detailed to the point of ecological information being established and the other end just being a typical fantasy world that transplants existing setting rules. I went with the former, because I don't know how to pick tasks that are of a reasonable scope. Using the Savage Worlds system, one of the worlds that I came up with for an RPG campaign that I ran was a small-ish continent in a world of haphazard magic along various ley lines. The premise was that people from Earth were reborn in this place with no memory of their prior life. As time went on their memories slowly returned and as the ages progressed eventually every life that came to Tharstradt was through a newborn that inherited memories instead of being born as an adult in a mysterious shrine towards the center of the continent. Understandably, it can be very hard to get a fe...

Pokemon GO is bad. Pokemon is ripe for the most amazing "social" gaming experience of all time. Just let them battle each other and don't screw with the existing formula that WORKS. Ahhhhh... Really though, knowledge of the underlying systems (mostly due to modding games and learning how to use GIS software) means that I can conceive of both the mechanics they utilize as well as how they got there from a design perspective. They want eyes on their app and they're going to do it with an interminable power creep as the generations of pokemon are added over time, mark my words. Instead of focusing on pokemon the game to use as a template, they're using it as a brand to market their existing formula. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who likes to learn about app development, but it is still mightily disappointing to anyone excited for a real life pokemon game. Judging by the player base of this broken game, that audience seems to be quite massive. As ...