Thoughts and such by Joshua Tong
Over the summer, I started playing Destiny 2 with my brother. We were both big fans of the first one, though divided by console choice and unable to play together. With his getting a PS4 and a summer of quarantine, it was time to dive into the sequel in a big way. Then we stopped… Continue reading Playground
A while ago, Merriam Webster (y’know, the dictionary) published an article that I found fascinating. It was about language as it’s used in Star Wars and it’s a short and interesting read. The gist of it is this: In Star Wars, George Lucas used a lot of plain, English words to create his world. There’s… Continue reading Story Language
Easily the highlight of my time playing Destiny was Vault of Glass. It’s a raid, that is a really difficult mission that requires serious teamwork and a pretty major time investment. It took work to even find a group to play with: I play on the PS4 and didn’t know anyone else who played Destiny.… Continue reading Play Together
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a magnificently glitchy game. I have seen a crewmate go through osmosis while talking to him, I've fought an alien dinosaur that suddenly stopped moving its body (but still glided along the jungle floor and attacked me), and, through cunning manipulation of my space-car's six wheel drive and boost functions, have… Continue reading Emerging Exploration
Movie tickets here in New York short you around $15 a pop. Which is a lot for a movie, but we go anyway because, y'know, movies. So it's worth it, price of admission and all that for those two hours. Conversely, your typical new video game costs $60 at base, ignoring deluxe editions, special editions,… Continue reading Bang For A Buck
What is fun? No, not what’s fun to do, what does “fun” mean? Johan Huizinga, a Dutch guy that wrote a lot about play and what play means, said in his Homo Ludens that “this last-named element, the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation.” He goes on to lament that there’s, to… Continue reading The Elusiveness of Fun
So with my Rationale out of the way, I picked up Destiny’s expansion-sequel The Taken King and put… many… hours into it. It’s a huge improvement on the base game and, for a change, feels like a complete game with stuff like story and what not. Which is great, because Destiny had world building in… Continue reading More Thoughts on Destiny’s Story
I talk about video games a lot on this blog, because I love them and play a lot of them. I also write about storytelling because it’s kinda my thing. Now, there’s a lot to say about video game narrative, which, honestly, can apply to narrative in general. Games are special because narrative — or… Continue reading In Defense of Destiny’s Story
There’s a building I can see outside my window that’s under construction. I’m not sure what it’s going to be or where exactly it is, but it looks to be somewhere in TriBeCa. The basic structure of it is there, there’s a crane going up the side, and it looks like the skeleton of a… Continue reading Background Details
On Thursday a new trailer dropped for Bungie’s Destiny. In the vein of trailers for Bungie’s prior games (like Halo 3: ODST’s trailer, which remains one of my favorite pieces of marketing ever), it doesn’t really tell you much about what the game is like. It’s live action, for crying out loud, not a cutscene, or let alone actual gameplay. Which… Continue reading Becoming Legend
