More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
Been poking through my old link docs from college. Will be posting a few classics. This is one of my favorite Bogost pieces -- he goes into why gamification is, most importantly, a method of ‘bullshit’. Not as just a generic slur, but as a method of obscuring labor with ‘games’.
communist construction under siege in a different twentieth century.
i made a video game. I will likely write about it on the Big Blog in the future
Dark Scrolls is a fantasy-themed action platformer that fuses shmup-style chaos with roguelite progression and is packed with charm, challenge, and secrets.
Dark Scrolls was made by some friends of mine! Check it out!
Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.
There's been chatter for the better part of a decade about "wholesome" as a marketing term. Small groups of people online criticize it, then participants in that scene are outraged. It continues, apparently, to attract an audience of people who believe that the term "wholesome" reinforces their sense of self.
Laura makes a great argument for "nurturing" as a genre title and opposed to the morally weighted (& politically fraught) term "wholesome".
I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.
Good piece on the recent Ren'Py generative AI debacle. For what it's worth, I'm making a game in Ren'Py and have no intentions of stopping doing that, but this sucks in a very particular way. I hate the modern age sometimes, you know.
What the heck's a Game Dad?
A cheap little handheld games console that plays every game you grew up with and all the ones you never got the chance to play. It has a proper D-pad and buttons and a good bright screen, and sometimes it has one or two analog joysticks as well.
Love this terminology and will be using it from here on out. Game Dad.
The Game Workers Conference is an entirely new game industry event made by and for the countless workers who make this massively influential industry and artistic medium succeed. The first iteration of the conference is being hosted by a partnership of various game industry unions and worker-cent...
Happening now! Some good talks so far.
Art and artifice in the fake 1990s
From its dialogue to the story it tells, Mixtape feels less like tribute and more like an escape into a fantasy no one’s actually experienced.
I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other criti…
"We can dress it up however we like, but the truth is that Mixtape is a vibes-driven experience riding high on some kind of media nostalgia. It is an on-rails narrative experience where you do some light exploration of a sleepy little woodland town among a group of three friends who are sitting on three different versions of the razor’s edge of adulthood, and the thing that pulls you through that narrative is a series of songs arranged into a mixtape that sets the mood for each scene in sequence. It has more in common with a set of narrative music videos like Dirty Computer than it does most other games that it sits on digital platforms with. I am sure there are people I am uninterested in engaging with who are mad about this."
Good piece by cmrn about Mixtape and late capitalism.
The creation and imperfect preservation of The Elder Scrolls' intentional incoherence.
After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks.
On Marathon (2026).