game Archives - Reality is a Game

Immersive experiences come in many flavours, my specialty is the delicious world of escape rooms. The most important design within an escape room are the puzzles themselves. Puzzle making can be difficult and challenging even to just think about. In this presentation I cover ways to approach designing puzzles to create an engaging experience. Creating puzzles is just one of many steps. Putting puzzles into the right sequence to create flow is vital to a successful game, just like in a video game.

Beyond puzzle designs I go into ways that designers can get inspiration to make games from video games or other fields they are interested in.

The talk was given at FITC Toronto in the spring of 2017.

Looking for escape game designs? At Wero Creative we make boutique immersive escape rooms for anybody who wants one.

If you want to know more about escape room design then check out my book.

Video edited by (and special thanks to) Wish You Were Here Productions.

Video game controllers have evolved quite a bit over the years from simple buttons to really technically complex controllers like the new one from Steam (which has sold out). They all operate using the same basic concept that the player presses a button and that button tells the game to do something.

Over time the number and arrangements of buttons has changed but the core concept has remained. Game controllers translate your physical input into something that makes sense within the game.

Many companies played with how a game controller ought to function and the ergonomics around them. From the simple Commodore 64 joystick to the button filled Atari Jaguar controller.

You can go to this website for a visual history of game controllers.

Dave Nunez has put up the innards of old game artifacts and they are surprisingly fascinating videos. He goes into the materials used (and why) then moves into how the actual game controller operates. These videos provide some context into why controllers are the way they are. One nifty part of his video is that he breaks down how the wiring works.

The first video he focuses on the Atari 2600 Joystick.