Kilobytes

I should be up front. I did not enjoy playing Clair Obscur. If you did, you probably don’t want to read this. I should also say that I don’t think my experience trumps anyone else’s. It’s just my experience. You may have loved this game, and that’s great. I respect that. I’m offering a counterpoint. I played Clair Obscure as an experiment of sorts. I do that sometimes, play even when I don’t…

Let me preface this by saying that there’s a lot going on in my head right now. I just finished reading Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds and made a lateral jump into Second Person, edited by Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin. Because Second Person is from 2007, the ludo-narrative war is ongoing, even in these pages. The interesting part about it, is that the question pretty much everyone should have…

So, it may surprise you to learn that there is one thing about Jedi: Fallen Order that I do like and that’s the gradual unlock of powers and skills. Considering how awkward the default controls are, this is a really good decision on Respawns part. What this means is that the player can get used to one thing at a time and train muscle memory accordingly. It doesn’t really help all the way, I often…

Yes, yes they do. Okay, so I woke up in the middle of the night, having dreamed about how to fix the radials in BG III. I don’t even work on that game. The worst part about this is that I can’t really get it out of my head. Sometimes a problem will lodge itself in there and it won’t let go, no matter how much I want it to. With the result that there are now an additional set of pages in my…

Okay, so I have a very snarky hypothesis I want to share with the world. This is my hypothesis. Men already think they know everything, even if they don’t which is why we even have a word for it – mansplaining. I think, and this is the snarky part, that men don’t like tutorials because they don’t like to be told what to do. I also think that because the games industry is still largely comprised…

Both Baldur’s Gate and Starfield have protagonists that have a lot of conversations with a lot of people about a lot of topics. I’ve mostly been playing Baldur’s Gate III and it has a leg up on Starfield. I can see my character in the cutscenes. In Starfield I can’t. The expressions of the face of my character in Baldur’s Gate III brings at least some emotion to the table. In Starfield, I have…

… but why are they all women? I’ve been playing Jedi: Fallen Order – reluctantly and with much pain – for about 20 hours now. What I’ve discovered so far is that all villains seem to be women. At least the named ones. The imperial soldiers are all men, of course, but the force users seem to be – on the whole – women. Second sister, Ninth sister, the Nightsisters on Dathomir and even Cere, since…

I have been a part of the games industry or gaming culture. I started in my early teens, trying to be a part of a hobby that didn’t really want me there. I tried going to conventions, already collecting games, tarting with the Swedish versions of various kinds. I’ve never been much of a joiner, but I did find my people after a few years. My people were a small group of players/ friends/…

One of the most common misconceptions about user experience design is that it is actually user interface design, or, as one of my former game directors seemed to believe, something that could simply be applied to a game after the fact. He used to say “we need some UX on that” or “put some UX on it”. What that meant, in effect, was that we (or I, since I was the sole UX designer at that point) was…

I’m currently in a gaming slump. I don’t want to play anything, not even the games I’ve been waiting for and wanting to play for a while. Sometimes this happens. It’s annoying that it is happening now, though, at this moment, when I’ve got two massive games with romance options to play. I think I’ve felt it for some time. I feel really antagonistic towards Death Stranding, which is my “hate game”…

This is a rant. I want to preface with that, because I’m going to be a bit rude and a bit annoyed and I’ll probably make some people angry as per usual, but I really have to say this. What the hell happened to both Starfield and Baldur’s Gate III? Did no one run their UIs through some usability testing? What’s the point of having tutorials that are contextual if they don’t go away after you’ve…

So, I’m trying to make input work in a game that I’ve been building as part of an Udemy course. The issue is that it is next to impossible to find the bug. I’ve been redoing the same class, or lecture, or whatever you want to call it, three times now, and it always fails and it always fails at the same step. My suspicion is of course that I’ve missed something but I don’t know what. Rewatching…

So, you’ll probably see a lot of these coming up the coming few weeks. I absolutely adore certain aspects of Stray Gods, and I will post about it and there will – due to the fact that the game is not very long – be spoiler-y clips. First out is Freddie, commenting on the Minotaur’s eating habits. I found it irresistible. http://discordia.se/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/SG_Freddie.mp4

I’ve been doing a bunch of captures lately. I’m trying to show my process, successfully or unsuccessfully, I’m not sure yet. I’ve been playing Mad Max, and I’m getting endlessly annoyed at the slow transitions between animations and the unreal twitchiness of the prompt triggers. It’s also fun to do one of those vacuuming exercises again, especially since I still seem to know exactly where all the…

I’ve recently played three games that I wouldn’t normally play. The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, God of War, and Jedi: Fallen Order. Common for all three is the archetype of the witch that pops up in the games. They’re all manipulative and treacherous, and one of the versions of the witch also plays on sexuality. It wouldn’t be so egregious if there were actual enemies that were women in those games…

A colleague of mine expresses constant amazement at the fact that I play games I don’t enjoy playing. He keeps asking me why I do this to myself. It is a valid question. Spite. I do it out of spite. No, seriously. Partly I think it is because I get annoyed at players who judge a game, often harshly, before even playing it. You have to at least have spent some time in a game before you can…

…my notebooks influence what and how I write? I’ve been thinking a bit about how my notebooks influence the way I write and which ideas I have. I realize this sounds suspicious. What on earth is she on about now? Well. What she’s on about is in principle the same thing I talk about when I discuss writing with pen on paper as opposed to keyboard and screen. To me, there’s a marked difference…