I love open world games as much as the next guy and I love good story lines probably even more than the next guy. But, do these two things really fit together? Does an open world always have to have a main story in it? Doesn’t the merit of open world lie in the explanation, …
When New Capenna came out, I was still caught up with how great Kamigawa Neon Dynasty was designed. I was in love with this set. That’s why although New Capenna delivered a lot of great cards that were fun to play with I never really warmed up to it. Not enough to write a piece …
“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” – Sid Meier Coincidentally, a story is about choices too. Choices define a character. Most stories – if not all – explore characters based on their choices in high stakes situations. According to that games and story should be a natural fit. Yet, there is the problem …
Video Games add another layer to storytelling. It’s not only audiovisual anymore, but also interactive. Interestingly, that quite obvious seeming fact was a long time overlooked. Only as Clint Hocking in his critique of Bioshock in 2007 pointed out what he coined “ludonarrative dissonance”, attention seems to have shifted on how the gameplay reflects the …
Competitive games show a similar structure to a story. In a team sport like soccer, we essentially pick a champion to root for. We think this team we like is morally or in terms of ability more entitled to win than others. Everyone knows exactly what the rules of the game are and what goals …
As announced in a post “Mass Effect: Command and Shepard, Part 1/4“, Story Structure will take a closer look at how the game series handles its theme of leadership. We will look at what tools are used to discuss the theme, how well the different tools work and to what effect they are deployed. This …
Throughout my journey with Magic the Gathering I noticed that there are certain cards that attract my attention, until I develop some kind of obsession with them. I started wondering why that is, what exactly it was that I found so endearing of these cards. So, I started to analyze them in an attempt to …
How does one tell a story about leadership? This series explores this question by analysing the Mass Effect trilogy. An entry is dedicated to each game in the series, to capture the development of Mass Effect from an ambitious idea with limited resources, over experimenting with the worldbuilding to the full-scale epic the series concludes …
Neon and magic? Not the first coupling I would think of when prompted with the challenge to find an iconic duo. Yet Wizards dared to bring the neon strokes into the high-fantasy world of the Magic the Gathering multiverse. Without knowing much about the official story of the set or the lore of the realm …
The Kamigawa Neon Dynasty set provides another cycle of mythic dragon cards. They are monocoloured and provide every colour with a flying creature that lets you choose among two effects when it dies. Also, they share a relation to the sky in their names. There is Ao, the Dawn Sky in white, Kairi, the Swirling …