Privacy Is Dead

Here is a reminder for all you internet users out there: your data is never private. The recent data leak involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is a reminder of such a fact, yet far too many people seem surprised that their data could possibly have been misused for nefarious reasons. And who can blame them? …

Let’s Plays and the Evolution of Storytelling in the Digital Age

Just over a year ago, a YouTube channel began uploading a Let’s Play of an unknown video game called Petscop. The game, according to the narrator who calls himself Paul, is a long-lost PlayStation title developed by a little-known studio called Garalina. Petscop is apparently unfinished, as Paul is quick to point out in the …

Accessibility: Designing Games for All

“Do you know why I wanted to interview you?” I was taken aback. After spending several hours the night before with my head buried in my copy of Gayle McDowell’s “Cracking the Coding Interview”, I was ready to take on any programming problem this guy would throw at me. Typically, with these kinds of interviews, …

MyIGN: A Gaming Community

A community is a group of people who share a common interest in a particular topic or hobby. A successful community is one in which its members share not only a common interest but also a mutual commitment to one another, a comradery or fellowship of sorts that thrives on the interactions between individuals, and …

The Importance of Player Agency

Agency (noun): the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power. When we talk about the greatest games of all time, we often only talk about the games that were in one sense or another “innovative,” games that did things that have never been done before, thing that were unique or interesting, thats …