In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem.

I still think this is one of the best pieces on how endings function in games and narrative more broadly.

Bluntly speaking, Bachelard said back in 1958 that games are not just graphics. They are architecture that create an experience. He would have made an excellent level designer.

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’.