Games

I care a lot about games. I've been playing them my whole life; I studied game design under Jesse Schell in graduate school, I've designed a few games.

Games I would recommend out of this collection - in particular, I think these give more than they take in terms of time and energy.

Interactive stories that earn their runtime:

• Graham Walmsley's The Thirty Nine Steps (~2 hours) adapts the Buchan spy thriller into a well-paced story world.
• Jim Nelson's According to Cain (~3 hours) is thematically ambitious and features wonderful, moody writing.
• Drew Cook's Repeat the Ending (~6 hours) at first blush hews to conventional adventure game tropes, but then thoroughly subverts them with a chorus of paratextual voices and interactions whose meaning is realized by the ending.
• Obsidian's Pentiment (~15 hours) is a work of thematic and artistic ambition, scope, and historicity. Mostly linear with both immediate branching and long-term global variables influencing the ending.
• ZA/UM's Disco Elysium (~25 hours) uses choices to explore where we find hope in a world of despair. It lets the player prioritize aspects of the protagonist's personality, and allows quite a bit of nonlinear exploration within a linear overall plot.

Games my wife enjoys.

• Dance Party (2018; p5, JavaScript)
• Plants vs Zombies 2 (2013; in-house engine, C++, Obj-C, Java)
• Plants vs Zombies Adventures (2013; Flash, ECMAScript)
• Star Wars Building a Galaxy With Code (2015; JavaScript)

• Business Battle (2011; Unity)
• Cookie Raid (2012; a dice game)
• Frog Secret Agent (2011; Unity)
• Galactic Supervillain Society (2012; a board game)
• Pepper Knave (2012; a D&D one-shot)
• Pyramids (2012; a dice game)
• Soul of Movement (2011; Unity, Kinect)
• There and Back Again (2012; a playground game)
• Tightrope Thrills (2011; Unity, VR)

• Asteroids 3D (1999; Wildtangent, JavaScript)
• Enchanted Forest (TI-83) (2003; TI Basic)
• Esther's (2022; Twee/Snowman)
• Flames of Gold (2002; Visual Basic)
• Hitotoki (2016; Inform 7)
• Memory (2016; p5, JavaScript)
• Netherworld (2012; Unity)
• Pac-Man (2003; JavaScript)
• Photonkart (2019; JavaScript, Circuit Playground)
• Planes (2017; p5, JavaScript)
• Pong Gauges (2007; Flash)
• Royal Council (2010; a card game)
• Snake (2017; p5, JavaScript)
• Splat! (2016; p5, JavaScript)
• Super Circle Run (2015; JavaScript)
• Tennis Jump (2016; p5, JavaScript)
• Tetris (2002; C#)
• Werewolf (2011; play-by-email)
• Wildflower Child (2017; JavaScript)

To document:

• Jedi Knight II maps, maybe?
• Extensions to Tim Alvey's DOTA-like Warcraft 3 game in 2007.
• Building the sailing ship / archipelago DOTA-like with Tim Alvey in 2007.

My attempt to curate a list of all of the games I've ever played. Here are some notable categories:

• Eyezmaze games: Chronon, Grow, Hatch, Pelpet, Tontie, Vanilla
• Jason Rohrer games: Between, The Castle Doctrine, Cordial Minuet, Gravitation, Inside a Star-Filled Sky, Primrose, Passage, Sleep is Death
• Terry Cavanagh games: Dicey Dungeons, Super Hexagon, VVVVVV
• Humongous Entertainment
• Sonic (series)
• Mario (series)

• It looks like I haven't spent significant time with any games that start with the letter 'X'. You'd think I would have played a bunch of some X-Wing or X-Men game by now, or even X-Files.
• Games with one-letter names: N, R

This project started in this spreadsheet but I'm gradually moving it to this wiki (250+ to go). A sampling of games I still need to document here: The Fox in the Forest, Iota, Metroid Prime, Too Many Ninjas, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Orion Trail, Rinkworks games, Lumines, Ridge Racer (PSP), LocoRoco (PSP), Burnout Legends (PSP)

Virtual friendly: Coup, Spyfall, Drawphone, One-Night Ultimate Werewolf, Jackbox, Contact, Enigma / Decrypto (netgames.io)

Games I still intend to play, especially those that have been recommended to me.

• Pendragon (owned, ~2.5 hours)
• Overboard (owned, ~2.5 hours)
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (owned, ~5 hours)
• OneShot (owned, ~5 hours)
• Still Wakes The Deep (~5 hours) - I like The Chinese Room and this is apparently more mechanics-heavy than their previous games and has fantastic acting and sense of place.
• Beacon Pines (~5 hours)
• Norco - because. WOFF found this underwhelming, but it got lots of other positive press and seems up my alley. (~5 hours)
• The Case of the Golden Idol (Steam) compared to Obra Dinn (~5 hours)
• Kentucky Route Zero (owned, ~10 hours)
• SOMA (Jeff recommended) (~10 hours)
• Metroid Dread (~10 hours)
• Hi-Fi Rush (owned, ~11 hours)
• Heaven's Vault (uniquely for me) (owned, ~15 hours)
• Nobody Saves The World (~15 hours)
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (owned, ~20 hours)
• Wildermyth (owned, ~30 hours)

Games marked “owned” but not “played:”