Games Related — Dinaburg Writes

The other huge strength of procedural generation, to me, is that it creates too many possibility spaces for the designers to decide what is best. I do not like spending my time in a video game trying to guess what the designer wants me to do. That can sometimes be inevitable, but it still frustrates me when I start seeing the various gameplay inputs as tiny puzzles with a golden-path narrative outputs.

I am not immune to this; when my own brain starts telling me to look for the optimal route so I’m rewarded with seamless narrative breadcrumbing and cohesively designed narrative, I know I am not treating the emergent story like my story but like a book that I have to tape back together to read.

David DinaburgNovember 14, 2022Video Games, Procedural Generation, Chatscript

Dungeon H@cks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games

If you’ve never heard of the Amulet of Yendor, I don’t know how or why you would search this out. But if you have even the smallest amount of interest in video game history—of uncovering the roots of the procedurally generated loot tables that underpin the gaming world’s new hotness—then Dungeon H@cks is required reading.

David DinaburgNovember 11, 2022Video Games, Adventure, Rogue

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

Video games aren’t a given—they didn’t have to happen—but they are so ubiquitous now that I am very surprised that stories about their origins aren’t more popular. Changeable software cartridges connected to a hardware platform that piggybacks off of a preexisting and console-agnostic television is an insane idea in a world of closed units like arcade machines. Pulling a piece of software from dedicated hardware that was designed to do nothing else and shoving to into a generic platform while trying to retain the original shape seems herculean:

To draw the four pursuers, programmer Tod Frye relied on a technique called flicker. Each of the four ghosts is moved and drawn in sequence on successive frames. Pac-Man himself is drawn every frame using the other sprite graphic register….

David DinaburgJuly 20, 2022

Coming of Age in Second Life

So while I have never played Second Life, the chance to read scholarly work that takes the subject of virtual worlds seriously was too good to pass up. And Second Life does bring me back to my law school days of trying–and failing–to get any of my cybersecurity professors to engage with the wild things happening in virtual worlds. If I had 2006 back again, I would do more than just bring printed-out Something Awful forums about flying phalluses to office hours and play at issue-spotting with people who couldn’t possibly care less.

David DinaburgJuly 19, 2022MMORPG, Non-fiction, Anthropology

My Favorite Games of 2021

And all of a sudden, I was through the main story quest. I had leveled past 50 on four classes and had admitted to myself I was, indeed, a dragoon main. Never could have expected it. Then I found myself doing something I even less expected—I was running end game content.

I AM ERROR

I AM ERROR elucidates the functional, physical aspects of the Famicom and applies that knowledge onto the end product; it is why Mario looks the way he looks, or moves the way he moves; why the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros. are made from the same tiles.

David DinaburgMarch 15, 2021Nintendo, Non-fiction, NES, Platform Studies

My Favorite Games of 2020

Tech and games are much more ubiquitous now than when I used to spend the afternoon at my friend’s house watching them play The 7th Guest. Games your friends owned were extra-magical, because you didn’t have the option to learn them well or to explore at your own pace. Because you were pigging-backing on their familiarity, you could see things in them you were not prepared to completely understand on your own merits. Paradise Killer has that vibe: I don’t always know what is going on, but I know I like it.

David DinaburgDecember 29, 2020Nintendo, Video Games, Paradise Killer, Phantasy Star IV, Hades, Animal Crossing, CrossCode, Best of

You Should be Playing This: CrossCode

The movement, the puzzles, and the combat of CrossCode are so enjoyable. The major conceit—that you’re playing an MMO—allows some sideways commentary on video games in a way that’s really cute.

David DinaburgSeptember 14, 2020RPG, Secret of Mana, Action RPG, CrossCode, Video Games, Adventure

My Favorite Games of 2019

I would rather read about someone’s loose framework of rind-rationalizing than further entrenchment of the vanilla oligarchy, so I guess I’m part of the problem. But this list isn’t designed to be “You’re eating your apple WRONG” clickbait—not that anyone admits when it is—and I don’t think I was counterculture for the sake of standing out.