The Archive
Five long-form pieces on game design, each one trying to answer a different question about why the medium works the way it does.
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The Loop That Keeps You Playing: How Feedback Architecture Works
The micro loop, the session loop, the progression loop. Three nested structures that determine whether a game feels satisfying or hollow — and why most developers only fix the outermost one.
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Difficulty Is Not a Slider: What Challenge Curves Actually Measure
We talk about difficulty as if it's a single variable. It isn't. There are at least six distinct axes along which a game can be hard, and conflating them is why difficulty settings so often feel wrong.
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Open World Fatigue Is a Design Failure, Not a Player Problem
The map full of icons isn't a feature. It's an admission that the designers couldn't make the world interesting enough on its own terms. How open worlds lost the plot — and why a few recent ones haven't.
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Sound Design as the Hidden Difficulty Axis
Audio cues do more than signal danger. They shape how hard a moment feels — independently of the mechanical challenge. The relationship between what you hear and how you perform is underexplored and measurable.
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The Live Service Math: Why Studios Can't Stop and Players Can't Leave
The business logic of live service games creates incentives that are structurally incompatible with good game design. This isn't about greed — it's about the equations studios have committed to.