He will destroy all of your carefully-crafted pacing and story beats. This is difficult because we can’t predict a priori what the design is going to look like when the game is finished.įurthermore, the player himself is an agent of chaos. For a coherent meaning to emerge, he says, the “dynamical meaning” expressed by the design and gameplay must dovetail with the meaning of the embedded story. I’m going to offer a solution to Blow’s “hard problem” of creating an interactive system that coherently expresses meaning.īlow says that games have more trouble than other media in conveying meaning because we have so many other things to worry about. It’s worth listening to on it’s own, and you also won’t get this essay if you haven’t listened to it yet. I’ve heard (and said) a lot of ideas that orbit around much of what Blow discusses, but I’ve never heard these concepts crystallized so effectively. Well, I just listened to it.įirst, you need to listen to this talk.

I didn’t get a chance to take in Jon Blow’s MIGS keynote from November until now.

Rimworld man in black