“ Hello caller, you are on the air. ” “I have lived here for about a year now, fleeing the outrageous rent in the Bay area down south. Port Astor? Oh yeah, it’s affordable, but the rent is four-hundred dollars for a fuckin’ reason, pal. This city ain’t right. You ever look at the eyes of people from here? Most of them glassy-eyed, and dead. They wander aimlessly. And the ones that ain’t? There’s something really wrong with them. You got the ones that’ll dome you for looking at them too long, or the real friendly ones. Like, even in the South they’d be pushing it. But here? They stick out like red wine on a wedding dress. I avoid those the most. The angry ones want to attack you, but I don’t know what the hell the smiling ones want.” “Then, once in a while, you get someone that could pass as normal. I don’t get it. There’s nothing remarkable about them, which is what makes them remarkable. Their normality is abnormal. What the fuck is it? I’m driving down the street, and past the usual

                    After some time, he’d lost track, Leon was let out of convalescence. He was not the same as he was when he was put in, nor had he been since he woken up in the first place; his hands would still sometimes shake involuntarily—an after effect of the electrical torture he had endured when he was initially taken prisoner. Pain would randomly shock his body for a moment, and then suddenly pass. His eyes were deepened into their sockets, and cheeks bony and gaunt. He felt as he thought he probably looked; a member of the living dead. After a few more days of observation in a separate cell, which he figured was for checking if he had any sort of communicable diseases, he was released into general population. The prison here, less than a formal penitentiary, was a work camp of some sort. It’s primary purpose was the refinement of various ores mined up by prisoners sent to the mines as a form of execution. Thankfully, although that is only said relatively, Leon had been plac

                  Encounters are the staples of any form of storytelling, interactive or not. They are quite literally what happens, and a story without events probably doesn’t exist. That said, there are many ways that titles found in games have approached encounters, for better or worse. What counts as an encounter in gaming? They can run the gamut, but most revolve around combat, either set-piece and bespoke, or randomly generated in this current age of proc-gen design, which can allow for more dynamic encounters. Here we are going to look specifically at two examples of games that used the two methods above, and why they weren’t necessarily the best approaches for either design reasons, or by their nature.                 The first game we are looking at here is Dead Space 3, which released in 2013, and was developed by Visceral Studios (r.i.p.), and published by EA. Dead Space 3 comes at the end of a development arc which I often call the horror-to-action pipeline, most probabl

 " Hello caller, you are on the air. " "Am I a bad person? I moved back home to Eugene after graduation. I got my degree in pharmacology, and to be honest, I didn't know what I was going to do with it. My mom told me, frequently, that she didn't know why I didn't go for pre-med instead. I told her it was because I just wasn't interested; the real reason was that I just couldn't bring myself to go into something that would eat so much of my empathy. What if I couldn't save someone? What would I tell a grieving spouse? 'I did all I could'? I could not tell her that I was a coward." "Am I a bad person? I couldn't take it anymore. I moved to Portland to get away. I got a job as a lab assistant at one of the universities in the city; better that than some retail pharmacy. I lived in an SRO building for a time. Truth be told, I kind of miss those days; me and the others there would get cheap sake and instant noodles from the nearby