Author Archives: Joseph Hilgard

Self-Determination Theory, part 2: Competence and Relatedness

by Joe Hilgard Don’t miss Part One of this article! Competence I also feel like most big-budget single-player games are not very good about providing opportunities for the player to exercise competence. When gameplay mechanics are simple, or challenges too … Continue reading →

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Self-Determination Theory, Part 1

Joe Hilgard Why do we play games? Recently, research has started to apply theories from motivation psychology to understand why people enjoy the games that they do. This is Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), and it is rapidly gaining … Continue reading →

Posted in Criticism | Tagged a bug's life 64 , Andrew Przybylski , autonomy , Dungeon Crawl , , fps map design , , game studies , , modern warfare 3 , ocarina of time , psychology , references to 1984 , self-determination theory , the elder scrolls , why do we play games , | 6 Comments

Simple Machines: Legend of Grimrock and the Joys of Coherent Design

By Joseph Hilgard “Video games are one of the few remaining artforms where there is an empirical positive correlation between budget and quality.” – The single dumbest thing anybody said to me about video games, ever. Legend of Grimrock is … Continue reading →

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What’s Wrong With Game Reviews?

What’s wrong with game reviews? I could complain what a useless measure game scores have become, since the current range of 8-10 scores is too restricted to have any meaning. Imagine how difficult it would be to talk about height if everybody’s height was described as a number between eight and ten. Worse, I find that the most interesting games tend to score in about the 85s, so imagine that sometimes people who were 10 feet tall were actually shorter than people who were eight feet tall. Even if the range of scores were better distributed, though, it still seems like the least interesting titles would still rise to the top. Why is that? Continue reading →

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Not Just Solid Food, But Real Food

by Joseph Hilgard I was excited to see that John Walker wrote a piece calling for more mature games. My excitement faded, however, when I saw that he approached this admirable goal in completely the wrong way – talking about … Continue reading →

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