Altug Isigan's Blog
Hello!
I'm Altug Isigan, a game studies scholar and game design teacher who spends most of his time reading, thinking and writing about games, art and creative writing. I'm a founding member of the IGDA Game Design SIG and a co-editor at Game Design Aspect of the Month (GDAM), a collaborative blog on game design which we run together with Sande Chen. I hold a PhD in game studies which I earned for a dissertation on interaction and narrativity in video games. I like being on Gamasutra because it makes me feel connected to people who care about games as much as I do.
Links:
http://altugi.wordpress.com -- my blog on games
http://gdsig.wordpress.com -- Blog of the IGDA GDSIG steering committee
http://gamedesignaspect.blogspot.com -- Game Design Aspect of the Month
http://kafaayari.wordpress.com -- a clog on games (in turkish)
Member Blogs
You don't know how to summarize your game idea? Well, here's a somewhat wicked method for you.
Point-of-View is not simply perceptual view. Find out what else is involved.
Games produce meaning, which allows us to say that they qualify as language. In this article I provide a preliminary sketch for a linguistic approach to games and apply it to the well-known game Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Every instance of gameplay is at the same time a narrative unit. Find out why.
Can we safely assume that games render emergent every instance of their use?
Non-winnability is often interpreted as open-endedness, and also being brought up as part of arguments that claim that games aren't stories. In this article I will discuss why these views are flawed.
Altug Isigan's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 09/06/2013 - 09:59]
It may sound like the ...
It may sound like the wrong thing to do, but I advise my students to avoid the use of chance-elements until into the later stages of design. The reason I do this is that I want them to focus on the core mechanics of the game before they start to ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/08/2013 - 10:02]
Quite some while ago, Stephen ...
Quite some while ago, Stephen Dinehart wrote an article on narrative design that had similar ideas with your 's. I 'm not sure whether he published it here on gamasutra or on the Narrative Designer 's Network. Tynan Sylvester also wrote about how dramatic structure must be forged through mechanics ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 07/28/2013 - 03:22]
I see two problems in ...
I see two problems in the question is this even a game : First, we ignore the fact that games are both language and narratives. Second, as such we ignore that languages and narratives can be of the broadest imaginable variety. Hence Tiny Tower is a game whose language and ...
Comment In:
[News - 05/30/2013 - 04:00]
Andrew, r n r nfortune, ...
Andrew, r n r nfortune, fame and power change one 's life for sure, but they do not change the world order in which these are perceived as the only way of changing one 's life.
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/28/2013 - 08:13]
Just to make a little ...
Just to make a little correction: The grief example belongs to E.M. Foster The Art of the Novel , as far as I know. He uses the example to point out the importance of causality in turning into narrative what is otherwise only a statement. Causality reframes the relationship between ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/17/2013 - 04:32]
Hitchcock said in an interview ...
Hitchcock said in an interview I think he was interviewed by Fran ois Truffaut that for him dialogue was the last resort in cinematic storytelling. r n r nVery thoughtful article, thank you.
