Recent content by GregChristopher

Excellent article, Ryan. As someone who is in the "art for art's sake" category, we are destined to disagree on a few things because we have different goals, but I like that you recognize the distinction there and realize the logic breaks for that person.

@ Nedjer I didnt cite specific examples because I don't have the time to back them up to the degree I would need to. Noam Chomsky describes this as having a lack of concision. I think a lack of concision is precisely what drives forum debates into the ground, people make statements that...

Wow. I stepped out for a couple days there to deal with some real life stuff, and I come back to find a series of replies that just remind me how much FAIL is in the industry right now. I thought I was pretty bitter before about how crappy the industry is at delivering what people want, but...

You are confusing what you have seen PDFs do, and what they can do

This is precisely the blind spot that is causing the lack of innovation, Viking. This is NOT what a PDF is. A PDF is a portable document format. It is designed to be useful to any operating system (you can even open a PDF on your smartphone, and read it if designed properly). It can be used...

That is pretty much exactly what I am going for in my Pieces of Eight game that is under development, Kevin. Check out this post I made today about my plans for doing the layout of one of the PDFs: Dark Horse Game Design: Layout Design for Pieces of Eight

Again, false analogy. The reluctance of a user to switch technologies is different than a producer of them. Falcarrion is partially right, device changes are making new opportunities, however they are a false choice for the majority because of the inherent efficiency of having Qwerty on both...

Elder Scrools goes out of their way to put a lot of fluff into the game via interactivity. They have actual history books on people's bookshelves that you can read

Could you take a page from the Elder Scrolls folks and just build it into the gameplay?

Kerensky, that's bs and you know it. Qwerty is a physical technology, thus serving as a boundary to change purely as an issue of fixed implementation. Nobody has to give up their poorly designed PDFs to get better ones, you would have to physically change keyboards. False analogy

@ Aberzanorax The second problem you cite is only a result of industry folks taking their print layouts and turning them into PDFs. When you have a PDF designed to be a PDF (i.e. not just a copy of what they printed), then you can shift to a landscape layout that fits your screen. Just go to...

Thinking more this afternoon, I think there might be something to be gained in the way video games present info.

It seems to me like we are moving into a media environment in which people are voracious consumers of the written word, but just not in the forms that we traditionally use; books, magazines, newspapers, etc. That is the not the written word they want to read. Instead, people are choosing...

I have not read the novels, nor do I care to. I gave up reading fiction when I started college, over a decade ago now. Note that I didn't say I gave up reading. I read voluminous amounts of material every day. I read huge quantities of non-fiction, both on the web and in actual books. And I read...

DOWNLOAD HERE Statecraft is a short 40-page game designed primarily for internet fora and play-by-email. It uses a simple easy-to-understand RPG chassis to facilitate a rich diplomatic style of gameplay. Players take on the persona of Soveriegns, the rulers of real-world nations, and then take...