Frist Post!

I, always the opinionated gamer, have often pondered, discussed, and argued the finer points of game balance and design philosophy in games both video and otherwise. In that regard this blog was inevitable in theory, although its execution leaves me wanting. I would have preferred setting up a server and running some home-brewed blogging software, but time seems to always be against me, so I've taken up the convenience of Blogger in order to ensure that at least some of my discussions reach the public.

So, if you've stumbled across this accidently, I should start by explaining what genres this blog intends to discuss. For the most part this blog will focus on adversarial games and adversarial aspects of games that aren't strictly adversarial. I'll try to keep the language as general as possible, as the concepts I'll be writing about can easily be applied to a large array of genres, but for specifics Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG or MMO), Real Time Strategy Games (RTS), and Fighting Games will be the main focus of discussion. Other sub-genres of Role Playing Games (RPG) will also probably be discussed.

First Person Shooters (FPS) will, for the most part, not be discussed. There's two reasons for this: I don't enjoy the genre all that much, and I don't think there's much to discuss that wouldn't be overly specific to individual games or series. I'm sure there's plenty of people who will disagree with me on that second point, but it's not something I'm all that interested in writing about.

Traditional board games also won't a focus of discussion, although I'm sure I'll mention them when explaining some concepts. The reason for this is because I believe any discussion of strategy would either be too abstract or too specific towards a single game or family of games. Chess, for example, is a game one could write a library of books about regarding strategy, but any given concept would either be specific to chess or general enough to be applied to any other genre being written about here. Balance also tends to be a dull subject when talking about traditional board games, as the only real balance question one tends to ask regarding that genre is how much of an advantage going first gives.

Well I think I've gone on for too long already, so I'm going to end this post here. I hope that any professional or aspiring game developers read this and take something useful away from it.