Category: Analysis

The Avatar Isn’t The Character. Identity Comes From Action

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Games spend enormous amounts of time establishing who the player character is. There are biographies, costumes, cinematic introductions, tragic childhoods, complicated family trees, heroic musical themes, and enough lore to explain why somebody has worn one particular shoulder pad for the last three hundred years. All of that can help define a character, but it can't make the player feel like that character. A detective doesn't become believable because they wear a trench coat. A survivor doesn't become vulnerable because their clothes are dirty...

Good Friction Makes The Fantasy Stronger

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A lot of games are designed around removing friction. Movement becomes faster. Failure becomes softer. Resources become plentiful. Objectives become impossible to miss. Characters automatically grab ledges, recover health, identify important objects, and politely solve half the problem before the player has finished working out what the problem was. These decisions can improve accessibility, pacing, and usability. That doesn’t make them bad. The problem begins when removing friction also removes the behaviour that makes the fantasy meaningful...

Games Shouldn’t Aim For Realism. They Should Aim For Believability

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A lot of games are trying very hard to look real. Skin stretches over simulated muscles. Rain collects on individually modelled surfaces. Characters have pores, eyelashes, fabric fibres, dental records, and enough facial detail to make you wonder whether the art team has accidentally created a second human being. None of that automatically makes the experience believable. A game can reproduce reality with extraordinary accuracy and still feel artificial the moment a character slides across the floor, an enormous creature changes direction without transferring its weight, or an object that appears physically important refuses to react to anything around it. The image looks real, but the behaviour underneath it breaks the illusion...

When Everything Affects Everything: The Overconnection Problem

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A strong systemic game isn’t one where everything connects to everything else. It’s one where the right systems connect in ways players can understand, predict, and use. When too many consequences propagate at once, depth becomes noise...

Rule Standards Teach Players What The World Believes

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Players do not learn a game world by memorising every object, enemy, room, and interaction one at a time. They learn by forming expectations. Fire usually burns. Sound usually attracts attention. Heavy things usually fall. Locked doors usually need a key, code, tool, route, or alternative solution. Once the player sees these relationships working often enough, they begin to treat them as part of the world’s normal logic...

Process Trust: Why Believable Games Need Accountable Systems

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Players are getting better at reading the process behind games. They notice when a world behaves consistently. They notice when a studio can explain what it made, why it made it, and who is accountable for the result. They notice when a mechanic keeps its promise, when a rule survives new situations, and when a production claim sounds like something the team can actually defend. They also notice when a game asks for trust it has not earned. That is why production is becoming part of design. Not in a boring spreadsheet way. In a player-facing way. The tools a team uses, the systems it protects, the shortcuts it accepts, the rules it keeps consistent, and the people it allows to own creative decisions all shape what the player eventually believes about the game. This is process trust...

Model Transferability Is How Players Learn The World

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

Good game systems do not just teach players what to press. They teach players how the world works. That difference matters because a player who only learns inputs can only follow instructions. A player who understands the model can solve problems the game has not explicitly explained yet. This is where Model Transferability becomes important...

Pixel art game studio revealing the shared knowledge network beneath a finished game world.

The Work Players Never See: Why Game Development Depends on Shared Memory

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A game studio does more than produce code, art, levels, and documents. It produces shared memory. This article explores how institutional knowledge, team continuity, and the history behind thousands of small decisions shape coherent games - and why losing that memory changes a project long before players ever see the consequences.

The Problem With Modern Immersion: Why Looking Real Is Not Enough

Posted on by Myles Blasonato in Analysis, Blog, Game Design

A lot of modern games look immersive before they actually feel immersive. The lighting is expensive. The animations are polished. The worlds are huge. Characters blink, breathe, sweat, stumble, and stare dramatically into the middle distance. Everything looks like it should pull the player in, but somehow the experience can still feel strangely hollow. That is the problem with modern immersion...