Sam Arbesman shared this post in his newsletter — highlights from Maxis’s annual letter (the makers of SimCity, the Sims, SimEarth, SimTower, etc.).
As much as it seems like the simulation tech Maxis developed over the years was all about top-down, “god mode” design — especially in SimCity — they’re just as impressive for the emergent gameplay they pioneered. SimLife was literally about watching evolution play out, followed up by an even-more-advanced experiment with evolution in Spore.
Packy McCormick is onto something with his recent pieces on web3 and the emergence of the “metaverse” being enabled by Ethereum.
This week he writes about Axie Infinity, a NFT-powered Pokémon-like PvP game built on the blockchain. The resemblances to Pokémon are many in terms of the gameplay, but that’s about the end of the similarities.
If they pull it off, Axie will be like Roblox on steroids, with better margins and better incentive alignment. Axie might become an even more important corner of the Metaverse, and a beacon for people building...
In high school I was pretty big into PC gaming. Games like Ultima VII, Syndicate, Fallout, Total Annihilation, and Crusader were in heavy rotation for years. Sid Meier’s Civilization II was particularly formative for me at the time it was released, and I’d credit with a lot of my early interest in world history.
An interview with media and gaming industry analyst Matthew Ball.
Make sure to listen to his thoughts on metaverses (around the 34:00 mark). The section on Epic Games and the future trajectory they’re putting themselves on is incredible.
Matthew Ball dives into Nintendo’s potential and what differentiates its culture from the rest of its media and gaming comparisons, like Disney.
The section on their mobile performance is particularly shocking. I knew Nintendo hadn’t been that engaged in trying to compete in mobile gaming (meaning iOS and Android), but it’s been a lot worse than I thought. Seems like it would be a dead-on win for them.
Obviously, Nintendo’s share of the economics declines across each group. This, itself, is not a problem. What’s a problem is that the greater Nintendo’s involvement, the less successful a mobile title...
One of my favorite games hit its 20th birthday. Two decades ago Deus Ex was an amazing achievement in open narrative, emergent game design.
In this piece, Rock Paper Shotgun gathered up a bunch of the original team from John Romero’s Ion Storm studio to look back on the process of creating the game:
Harvey Smith (lead designer): We were very influenced by three games: Thief, System Shock 2 and Half-Life. There was a lot of discussion around whether it was more elegant to get through a level without being spotted and killing everybody. But there...
The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no...
I enabled a trial of Google’s Stadia gaming service yesterday to kick the tires. In Google fashion, their entry into the gaming market isn’t centered around consoles and hardware, but cloud-distributed streaming.
During the unveiling at GDC last year, it seemed impossible to believe that you could deliver a latency-free, 4K experience in high-end games.
15 years ago I was gaming a lot more, but in the last several I’ve done almost none outside of the random iPhone game. I still loosely follow the gaming industry, and often wish I could easily jump in and mess around in...
This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.
A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.
This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.
I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming...
Maksim Stepanenko’s notes on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. I’ve got this one on the shelf, and these nuggets make me want to pick it up now to read.
This is a neat piece showing some of the process and iteration behind the Google design team’s work on the controller for their new gaming service, Stadia.
Olsson says the team went through “hundreds” of prototypes, some of which were more successful than others. One of the first steps included giving test subjects sculpting clay and letting them shape it to their tastes. The company then 3D scanned and photographed the models, most of which were, at Olsson puts it, “not so successful.”
Another prototype included a controller with a grid-shaped pattern on the front that allowed...
If you enjoy hearing stories from visionaries, listen to this talk that Gabe Newell (founder of Valve) gave at UT Austin:
In it he discusses economies within Steam, where Steam is headed as a central core of APIs for game publishing, and a good bit about how the company operates.
“It seems fairly obvious that the Internet does a better job of organizing a bunch of individuals than General Motors or Sears does. Corporations [with hierarchies] tend to be pre-internet ways of...