Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode

I've met a lot of Firefly fans. I'm one myself. Apart from enjoying the show, we all have one thing in common: we want there to be more Firefly fans. We want to share the show with others. We want more people to have the experience, to know how great it is, to laugh at the jokes and fall in love with the characters. We want more people to talk with about the show, who will know what we're talking about and share our enthusiasm. We want more people to buy the DVDs, to cast an economic vote of "more like this!" so that maybe Joss's next show won't get screwed over.

It's an inclusive fandom. We want there to be more of us. More Browncoats is better.

Future's Past: Ratchet & Clank and the Problem of Sequels

Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank have come a long way. Seven years after their first outing in late 2002, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time marks the ninth installment of a franchise spanning three platforms. (Tenth and four if you count the oft-forgotten Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile.) They've even got action figures now.

A Crack In Time is easily the best Ratchet & Clank game on the PS3, and will be many fans' favorite of the whole series. It certainly does have several series bests: the best writing, the best humor, the best Clank gameplay, the return of the series's best villain, and the single most fascinating and complex character ever to grace a Ratchet & Clank game.

But to understand A Crack In Time's greatest triumph, what it accomplishes that none of its predecessors do, we have to look back through the evolutionary paths traced by the series.

Why Your Demo Sucks: Design Errors and Cognitive Dissonance

Like the pre-order metagame and the trophy/achievement metagame, demos are part of the less-evolved fringes of game design. Which is odd considering how long we've had demos in one form or another. Shareware has been around since at least the eighties. But not every developer made use of it, and only now with the latest console generation has heightened internet access resulted in widespread freely-available demos for consoles. We are still figuring out how to design games, but we are even more in the dark about how to design demos.

In fact, it's not even entirely clear that we should design demos. Research on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games suggests developers are better off not making demos at all, and should just make trailers instead. It's not clear, however - there are many confounding variables here.

Mirror's Edge: What Went Wrong and Why

Mirror's Edge is a Bad Good Game. The foundation is solid: players take the role of Faith, a genuinely badass woman with a non-exploitative, unconventionally beautiful design whose motivations revolve around survival and protecting her sister. Faith parkours her way around an unnamed city of bright colors and austere beauty, and is trained in a variety of disarm techniques should she encounter armed attackers she can't simply outrun. Sounds good, right?