This is a collection of the best posts on Game Design Advance

Bernie DeKoven
by Frank Lantz
“…we play games for a purpose – for a particular kind of pleasure, beauty, and meaning – and looking at this purpose helps us understand what’s going on in a game, in this dance between games and players, rules and play.”

The Fruit of Knowledge
by Frank Lantz
“Every time I start a game of Serpentes I have to deliberately flush out the registers of my short-term memory. This is a game in which forgetting is a key skill. Then during play, as I discover the new properties of the different fruits, I must actively re-wire the connections between image and meaning.”

The Procession of the Line
by Charles J Pratt
“Ridiculous Fishing is not a game.”

In Praise of Spoilsports
by Charles J Pratt
“To the spoilsport a game is not a product that you pluck off a shelf and bring home to place in a machine. A game is rather a social confluence of motivations and practices.”

Games are Not Media
by Frank Lantz
“We’ve lived with games forever, but we are only now starting to aggressively explore them as meaningful culture.”

Proceed with Caution: Process and Contingency in Games and Art
by Scott Hoffer
“Ultimately, these parallels offer a way of considering both the ‘gameness of art’ and the ‘artness of games’ more than they suggest that games are art, or vice versa.”

Wandering Towards Interactive Narrative
by Charles J Pratt
“What Shiren proves beyond a shadow of the doubt is that at the end of the day the most interesting story in a game should be your own.”

The Case Against ‘Art-Games’
by Charles J Pratt
“The prevailing wisdom may be that games have not achieved the vaunted status of ‘art’, but perhaps the problem isn’t with games.”

Turn Me on, Dead Man: Why Urban Legends Make the Best ARGs
by Bob Clark
“Truth can be stranger than fiction, and wrangling it can keep everything simple as long as you stick to the lessons you learned the fiftieth time you listened to Revolution #9.”

Advice for Aspiring Game Critics
by Charles J Pratt
“Games are aesthetic experiences and critics should strive to understand and communicate the ramifications of a design choice and not dismiss it out of hand as if there is some Platonic ideal that all games should strive towards.”