Wiring Games for Lightbulb Moments – The Power of Realization over Revelation By Jonathan Fenn • September 24th, 2025 Invoking this feeling doesn’t need to be built up over many hours to work, it can also be distilled to one delightful moment.
Press F to Play “Respect” By Jonathan Fenn • June 3rd, 2025 These songs also carry with them a wealth of cultural context.
Skin Like A Waxen Peel: Revisiting Everything Everything’s “Photoshop Handsome” in the age of AI Image Slop By Jonathan Fenn • February 27th, 2025 A core idea of “Photoshop Handsome” is that impossibly-perfected images can have a significant impact on social psyche.
Shadows of Worlds Unto Themselves By Jonathan Fenn • December 3rd, 2024 A big limitation of videogame ecosystems is their strong focus on predation and conflict.
Who Deserves the Future? By Jonathan Fenn • October 4th, 2024 Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes highlights the lack of conviction from which post-apocalyptic stories often suffer, in their insistence in constantly refocusing on humanity’s story.
Death, Doubt and Dynasties: The Unlikely Link Between Aerith Gainsborough & Logan Roy By Jonathan Fenn • June 18th, 2024 Having finished both Succession and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth in the last year, I was struck by a much less expected parallel – between Logan Roy and Aerith Gainsborough.
Getting the Band Back Together: Players Orchestrating Worlds By Jonathan Fenn • March 13th, 2024 The reason bringing musicians together works so well as a gameplay trope, is that it capitalizes on connection and creativity at its core in a mechanically satisfying, and often narratively significant way.
Fun in N-dimensions By Jonathan Fenn • December 1st, 2023 The ever-expanding world of space-twisting puzzlers offer captivating worlds not possible outside of videogames.
Final Fantasy, Zelda, and Gradients of Apocalypse By Jonathan Fenn • May 15th, 2023 The act of actually representing the transition between these peace, conflict, disaster, and rebirth in game is a massive challenge.
All The World’s A Stage By Jonathan Fenn • February 8th, 2023 Theatrical allusions don’t need to hit you over the head with high-concept meta-textual narratives in order to be effective.
