Extra Credits

As games become more and more popular as a past time, there's become a growing conversation about the difficulty of games. We've all had that experience where we've hit a wall in a game we otherwise loved or a game was so easy it couldn't engage us for more than 10 minutes. Most games attempt to answer this difficulty by offering different modes that usually tweak enemy & player health, or enemy & player damage. Which is... fine. It's fine. But what about games like Ghost of Tsushima, Control, and the new gold standard, The Last of Us Part 2?

Everything old is new again! All storytelling mediums eventually wrap around to trying to retell the stories of the past, but what does that mean? What is the difference between a reboot, remaster, and a remake? And how does Final Fantasy VII: Remake challenge the definitions we've set up for ourselves?

As we refocus the conversation about games around accessibility, there's one area that often gets overlooked. Technical accessibility can be just as important and as big a barrier for people as physical accessibility. Computer games can get expensive when you account for all of the parts that go into building even a modest gaming rig. And as games have exploded in budgets for dazzling particle effects and cutting edge graphics, it can cut out a lot of gamers from the experience. So how do developers go about making games that can be played on high and low end machines?

Nothing is more iconic to fantasy roleplaying games than class systems. The warrior, the mage, the rogue. These archetypes make up a lot of what people envision when thinking about games like Dungeons and Dragons. So how can you make your own classes, regardless of what genre you're designing for?

It's been 5 years since we did an episode on videogame movies so let's take a look at where we've gone and where we've yet to go. In a world where comic books rule the cinema and an entry into the Mad Max franchise swept through the Oscars, why have video game movies been left by the wayside? We think that it has something to do with how video game movies tend to treat the main characters... or rather, not treat them, as a way to preserve lore perfectly.

While we've had episodes on Free to Play games, and on some of the paid elements like lootboxes, we've never really made an episode on monetization models in video games. And that's big because like it or not, how you choose to make money off your video game can have huge effects on how you go about designing your game. So let's pry open the game and take a look at premium games, downloadable content, season passes, and yes, even loot boxes.

Looking to add a little depth and intrigue to your D&D game? Wondering how to give your players tough choices throughout your narrative? Confused as to how designers can make you rethink your decisions and moral code when playing a game like Mass Effect? Well, find out all the secret details to building fictional belief systems and creating fictional morality today!

A lot of us have been playing video games since our early childhood. Interacting with our favorite medium for years but, outside the joy games can bring, does our dedication to them bring us any real-life benefits? Or to put it more bluntly, can the virtual skills we develop in video games materialize into real-life skills, and can we answer that question with some research and a jet ski?