This is really good. I had some beginning-threads of thought at the time of the Bogost article that I just couldn't frame, and in the meantime, CJP has run with similar threads, a good dose of history, and come to some sharp conclusions, and basically reminded me what I actually think. So I'm just going to point at this to say "yes, I think this, and this is better expressed than I could ever have put it". Strong stuff.

"If reinterpreting Ryu is a character design test, remaking Tatsu is like a designer’s Kobayashi Maru — you’re going to fail it no matter what, but the way you fail might teach you something." I enjoyed all of Patrick's post in this series, but this quote really leapt out at me.

Rich Vreeland and Akash Thakkar on the sound design and composition for Hyper Light Drifter. Really good, straightforward talk about building a world through sound.

Nice writeup of "press forward" tracks in Trackmania from Robert Yang. I knew about the genre, but hadn't twigged that the key to its existence was that Trackmania's physics are deterministic. Which of course, makes sense, now I think of it.

Lovely article about Mahjong and its role within one family, and one man's life. Really good games writing. (Also, god, I miss playing Mahjong. I never got quite good enough, and still really want a set… and the the friends necessary to go with it).

"Once the pro­gram­ming went wonky on me and Tri­co re­fused to jump up to that first wa­ter­fall for a sol­id half hour. But I sus­pect that any soft­ware suf­fi­cient­ly ad­vanced to do what Tri­co does at some point be­comes in­dis­tin­guish­able from a cat." Tim Bray on The Last Guardian

Good looking Unity audio library (as used in Mini Metro).

"If losing a normal game of monopoly is frustrating, losing to this strategy is excruciating, as a losing opponent essentially has no path to victory, even with lucky rolls. Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you're playing to win, and that it wasn't your idea to play Monopoly in the first place."

Bloody marvellous: Aubrey dives deep on _precisely_ why strafejumping works, with references to the right bits of the Q3 sourcecode in github. I love this sort of videogame forensics combined with clear explanation.

"The lesson games have for design is not really a lesson about games at all. It’s a lesson about play. Play isn’t leisure or distraction or the opposite of work. Nor is it doing whatever you want. Play is the work of working something, of figuring out what it does and determining how to operate it. Like a woodworker works wood. By accepting the constraints of an object like a guitar (or like Tetris), the player can proceed to determine what new acts are possible with that object. The pleasure of play—the thing we call fun—is actually just the discovery of that novel action." Not just this quotation, but all of this article, really. So good. Immaterials, again.