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Procedurally Generated Thoughts

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While discussing how Sim City and it's city-building model could be adapted for non American cities the importance of history came to my mind. In London you see history wherever you are. Near to my house there is the disused picadilly line York Way tube station. If you stand near it and look out at the view that presents itself you see the old Victorian kings cross station next to the glass building of St Pancras Int. and many cranes helping turn abandoned industrial buildings into new skyscrapers and arts university campuses. It's a rich and interesting landscape. Another bustling recently gentrified street nearby is Upper Street which owes its original path as far back as to the Celts. In turn, London grew organically from Thames access, one of those mechanisms making up the majority of your GCSE geography knowledge.. The city just wouldn't make sense being anywhere else. History and iteration are also fundamental to how nature constructs life. Although for each gene...
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Games are data, not Renderers

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Was Quake 3 the same as American McGee's Alice the same as Soldier Of Fortune? Are Astroneer, Moss, Unravel the same games? The answer is clearly no, even though each set of these games share roughly the same platform technologies. The variety of experiences we create from the same technologies are bounded only by tooling and input data. This doesn't ignore the fact that those experiences owe to a renderer. In reality though that we are ultimately trying to achieve by making games is to key into the overall consciousness of the players, meaning their imaginations, possibility space, and thought processes. Something running at a decent framerate with graphical detail is the cherry on top . Why are so many creators obsessed with underlying technologies? Why has that obsession bled out into the players consciousness? I'm a victim to this technology first way of thinking. I ultimately want to create and share thematically interesting interactive experiences, though too oft...
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The 1996 videogame Z, and the Men of War series have a lot in common, and I enjoy both

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 Z stands out. It comes from a time when command and conquer (following on from Dune 2) was busy setting the tone for RTS. Arguably until Ground Control again doing away with base building, and more modern touch points of the Dawn of War game bringing it solidly into the collective consciousness. These comparisons have already been made in the "have you played" series on RPS in "have you played... Z" The above is a simple comparison making exercise, cherry picking examples of popular games, ignoring the melange of RTS ideas at the time and those ideas inherited from the board game or war game worlds. The prevailing narratives about which game first introduced what mechanic lack nuance and are most likely false. Like the histories of many other fields. My own comparison is between Z and Men of War.  I feel that the micro in Z resembles the randomness of Men of War quite closely. Several light tanks can sometimes destroy a medium, or just as well not. Moments of Heroi...
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