*under construction
This essay collection explores the breadth videogame design from gameplay, storytelling, world building, and philosophy. These titles offer a wide-range of game styles from many different franchises, creators, and consoles across the medium’s history.
Discovering Videogames
The Legend of Zelda
Life is an adventure, and videogames can prepare you for it. Through Shigeru Miyamoto’s milestone, discover how braving the mysterious and facing the dangerous can be a soul-enriching experience that makes your tale worthy of legend.
PART 1: Analyzing Gameplay and Developing Form
Mega Man X4
Let Capcom’s iconic Blue Bomber teach you the basics of side-scrolling action game design, from 2D obstacle courses to animation to ranged versus melee combat, and see the evolution of Mega Man’s design across generations.
Pong, Windjammers, & Lethal League
Games offer virtual metaphors of real-world actions including sports. In this analysis of different versions of Pong, see how rulesets, mechanics and systems, button configurations, and multiplayer modes creates machines that not only create the world but can act as a referee and opponent.
Yu Suzuki
Meet Sega’s arcade legend, and learn about his significant contributions to arcade hardware, the racing, shooting, and fighting genres, and how he remade the world in 3D.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
The world is full of challenges and littered with the tools to conquer them. Load into Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts to learn about engineering, and how creatively combining your tools can even let you defy physics itself.
Street Fighter II
Translating thousands of years of martial arts science into mechanics, systems, and animations, Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda’s Street Fighter II created the blueprint for videogame combat, establishing the roshambo of strike/block/throw gameplay while introducing one of the most iconic casts of characters the medium has ever seen.
Halo 3
Halo: Combat Evolved created an agile first-person shooter model, but Halo 3 completed it. By harmonizing player controls and smart enemy A.I. into a design with immense scalability, Bungie created a shooter with large options for players to express themselves.
Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner
Jump into the cockpit of Shuyo Murata’s cult classic mech bonanza and see what ZOE2 can teach you about the relationship between humans and technology, and how automation can merge different gameplay styles into a single game.
PART 2: Defining Character and Scripting Story
Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening
Devil May Cry may have translated 2D hack and slash games and brawlers into 3D, but Devil May Cry 3 elevated the design into a full single player fighting game. See how Hideaki Itsuno’s complex combat design captured the essence of its wild hero Dante.
Metal Gear Solid
As genes are the building blocks of life, polygons are the material of a three dimensional world. With MGS, Hideo Kojima redefined storytelling with a reactive 3D camera system and scripting to invisibly direct the player through Shadow Moses’ interactive action movie.
Resident Evil 4
The hardest things to design are often the ones that draw the least attention to themselves. In Resident Evil 4, Shinji Mikami evolved his famous survival horror design into a tense, action packed game that not only defined third-person shooting but taught it’s gameplay in subtle and sophisticated ways.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Shu Takumi’s legal comedy was different than the visual novels that came before, having players comb over witness testimony for contradictions in the their own investigations. But to make it’s gameplay functional AND cinematic, Capcom had to smartly script out its story, gameplay systems, and animations.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
Connecting different gameplay styles is about finding a common anchor point, and 13 Sentinels successfully combines visual novel storytelling with real-time strategy combat. See how George Kamitani merged time traveling, pop-culture, and mecha, into a story about growing up, standing tall, and moving on.
Asura’s Wrath
Videogames have been many things, but Asura’s Wrath was the first full one recreated a full season anime. Able to easily and cinematically switch between action-packed chase scenes, fast-paced brawler scenes, and expressive, exhilarating cutscenes, Seiji Shimoda crafted a beautiful epic about fate, the universe, and family.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
One of pop culture’s most iconic rivalries comes alive in Batman: Arkham Asylum, and shows insight into the relationship between character, story, and level design, with the struggle for control over Gotham’s famous psych ward representing more than the conflict between The Dark Knight and The Crown Prince of Crime, but between order and chaos.
PART 3: Composing Worlds and Defining Aesthetics
Metroid Prime
The TV screen is one of the biggest barriers between player and game world, but Metroid Prime helped prove that smart design decisions can shatter the limitations. By creating a vibrant, colorful world and adding touches that made the player believe they walked its terrain, Prime brilliantly layers the planet Tallon-IV with information, visible and not.
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Mario Bros. set the standard for creative side-scroller obstacle courses, and Odyssey celebrates the series’ by not only translating the concepts into a tightly paced 3D adventure but integrating new 2D sections directly into its levels.
Perfect Dark
Maps setting and routes, mission design, internal clockwork, alarms, difficulty scaling
Dead Rising
Survival is a fight, a fight against time, hunger, and death. In Yoshinori Kawano’s Dead Rising, photojournalist Frank West tests his ability to survive against a horde of zombies and psychopaths, locked in a bountiful mall, where he must learn the mall, discover the permanence of his actions, and become strong enough to survive the clock.
Grand Theft Auto 3
The real world is built of interlocking systems and functions, but before Grand Theft Auto, videogames had to segregate each into separate titles. GTAIII merged disparate game styles, from platforming to third person shooting to racing, into Liberty City, a place where you could rise to the top of the world, if you were able to escape the law.
Okami
Society and theology, world language, aesthetic, positive change in the world
PART 4: Outputting Videogame Lessons Back Into The Real World
Rez
Life is the pursuit of knowledge as we crawl from the abyss of the unknowable into a world to attain wisdom. Maximizing sensory stimulation, Rez brilliantly uses thumping techno music, an interesting visual aesthetic, and hypnotic gameplay to build a transcendent digital soundscape that pierces the veil of consciousness and helps you attain enlightenment.
Hotline Miami
Self-reflection and game taking over behavior
Saints Row the Third
A productive philosophy
God Hand
Videogames are uniquely able to create digital dojos and new types of martial arts, and in Shinji Mikami’s cult-classic brawler God Hand, the player can train their body, master their mind, and forge a fighting spirit that will let them even take on gods.
Lost Planet 2
A machine for coming together
Nier: Automata
As technological advances blur realities, the processes that build videogames increasingly reflect the real world, blurring the lines between them. In Nier: Automata, Yoko Taro shows how the machine world is overtaking the natural world, and what it means for humanity’s future.
Dark Souls
Power manipulation, false realities, analyzing systems, discovering real world
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