Line Hollis | Videogame criticism

Guess What I’m Thinking About

June 20, 2011 / 0 comments

I find room escape games kind of unsettling, for reasons I have trouble putting my finger on. Room escapes are a popular casual gaming genre that offer Myst-like puzzling in a short form. You’re stuck in a room and need to get out. So you find some keys, crack some simple codes, and combine objects until all the…

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New Robot Geek post: Guess What I’m Thinking About

June 20, 2011 / 0 comments

This week on Robot Geek: I try to find deeper meaning in my tendency to be creeped out by room escape games in Guess What I’m Thinking About. This was kind of a review post that expanded to the point that I decided to make it a feature. Also on Robot Geek this week are…

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AI and Character

June 17, 2011 / 3 comments

I’m starting to set up some of the basic AI programming in Mouthwash, my work-in-progress conversation system. (Some background here.) I wasn’t planning to get to that stuff so soon, but it became apparent pretty quickly that a lot of other stuff depends on the speakers having “goals.” So I’m having to deal with planning…

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Pathos (2011)

June 16, 2011 / 3 comments

The relationship between the player and the avatar varies a lot between games. Sometimes the avatar character is meant to be an unembellished extension of the player, as in any first-person game with a faceless, voiceless protagonist. Those are increasingly rare in mainstream games, however. Usually the avatar has some character of her own, whether…

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Back and Forth

June 13, 2011 / 0 comments

Why do we replay games? In some cases there are easy answers to this question. Some games we replay because the basic mechanic is fun and doesn’t get stale with repetition. Sometimes we replay games for the same reason we reread books or rewatch movies: because we enjoy the experience and want to go through…

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New Robot Geek post: Back and Forth

June 13, 2011 / 0 comments

I’ve got a new post up at Robot Geek. Check it out. It’s about replayability and why we care about it. It’s inspired by a research paper I came across in the course of my day job, which makes it a weird worlds-colliding kind of thing for me. I’d like to dedicate this one to @LadyAether,…

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New Robot Geek post: The Hostile Guide

June 7, 2011 / 0 comments

I have a new post up at Robot Geek called The Hostile Guide. Check it out. It expands upon some of the ideas from my review of Loved and other games. It’s also an examination of a storytelling trope that is mostly unique to videogames. I’m planning to do more of those in the future….

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The Hostile Guide

June 7, 2011 / 0 comments

[Note: This post originally appeared at Robot Geek. I’m gradually backing these up here.] Spoiler alerts: Bioshock, Loved, Mass Effect 2, Memento, Portal, Seven Minutes, The Usual Suspects. The recent release of Portal 2 has rekindled the world’s love affair with GLaDOS, the chirpy AI who delivers instructions and insults throughout the original game. GLaDOS represents a…

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A Brief Introduction to Mouthwash

June 2, 2011 / 3 comments

Previously, I’ve talked about conversation systems and my discontent with them. Talk is cheap; so in addition to complaining about it, I’ve been working on an engine called Mouthwash to make these ideas more concrete. Eventually I do plan to develop some games with it, but for now it’s a lot of notes and a…

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Housekeeping

May 25, 2011 / 0 comments

So, I’m writing at the group blog RobotGeek now, apropos the offer on this post. In embarrassing related news, you can now reach me through email by clicking the avatar head on the sidebar. The deal is that I’ll be writing longer weekly (!) features at RobotGeek. Here’s one, go read it! While you’re at…

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