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Shamus Young Dot Com
I'm Shamus Young, a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. I have
produced an unbelievable volume of content over the years. If you're looking for
the newest stuff, then read the blog, which has updated an average of once a day
since 2005. But if you're looking for just the good stuff, then you can
cherry-pick from the articles below. Enjoy!



THE TRUTH ABOUT PIRACY

What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?

 


TITLEWHAT’S INSIDE SKINNER’S BOX?

What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what
does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?

 


REVISITING A DEAD ENGINE

I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day
Unity. This is the result.

 


THE BEST OF 2018

I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought
were interesting or worth talking about that year.

 


A STAR IS BORN

Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So
dumb I was compelled to write this.

 


PIXEL CITY DEV BLOG

An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a
few rectangles of light.

 


PROJECT FRONTIER

A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from
simple data.

 


RESIDENT EVIL 4

Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?

 


MARVEL'S CIVIL WAR

Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making
that decision?

 


QUAKECON 2012 ANNOTATED

An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate
it for the non-coders.

 


TRUSTING THE SYSTEM

How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More
importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?

 


SPOILER WARNING

A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.

 


PHILOSOPHY OF MODERATION

The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with
the wrong goals in mind.

 


GOOD TO BE THE KING?

Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer
in the 21st century?

 


WHY I HATED RESIDENT EVIL 4

Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!

 


PROJECT OCTANT

A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can
experiment with Octree data.

 


INTERNET NEWS IS ALL WRONG

Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could
it be made better?

 


DEAD OR ALIVE 5 LAST ROUND

I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out
why they bothered with the story at all.

 


MEGATEXTURES

A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was
supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.

 


GRAND THEFT AUTO RETROSPECTIVE

This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most
profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship
with the series.

 


THE GRADIENT OF PLOT HOLES

Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you
notice them while immersed in the story.

 


ARTLESS IN ALDERAAN

People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they
overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.

 


THE BRILLIANCE OF MASS EFFECT

What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of
the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?

 


BETHESDA’S LAUNCHER IS EVERYTHING YOU EXPECT

From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam
competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability
and anti-features.

 


THE MIDDLE AGES

Would you have survived in the middle ages?

 


BLISTERING STUPIDITY OF FALLOUT 3

Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically
confused, and patronizing.

 


THE BEST OF 2014

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.

 


STARCRAFT: BOT FIGHT

Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart
it is. Or isn't.

 


PLEASE HELP I CAN’T STOP PLAYING CITIES: SKYLINES

What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts
that came before?

 


SKYRIM THIEVES GUILD

The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes,
contrivances, and nonsense.

 


THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE SHORT CRITICISM

Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical
retrospectives.

 


THE BEST OF 2015

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.

 


MASS EFFECT 3 ENDING DECONSTRUCTION

Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where
it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.

 


DEUS EX AND THE TREACHERY OF LABELS

Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was
clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.

 


CHAINMAIL BIKINI

A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived
roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.

 


HOW TO FORUM

Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things
when you talk to each other.

 


LINUX VS. WINDOWS

Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.

 


MMO POPULATION PROBLEMS

Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for
massively multiplayer games stay about the same?

 


SILVER SABLE SUCKS

This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in
the game for all the wrong reasons.

 


HOW I PLAN TO RULE THIS DUMB INDUSTRY

Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA,
2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)

 


THIS GAME IS TOO VIDEOGAME-Y

What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?

 


FABLE II

The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This
game hates you and thinks you are stupid.

 


THE BEST OF 2016

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.

 


CRASH DOT COM

Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy.
Turned poor. It was fun.

 


DIABLO III RETROSPECTIVE

We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we
overlooked just how terrible everything else is.

 


THE BIGGEST GAME EVER

Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How
big would it be?

 


STARCRAFT 2: RUSH ANALYSIS

I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how
they compare.

 


THE STRANGE EVOLUTION OF OPENGL

Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes
it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.

 


WHAT IS PIRACY?

It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea
of right and wrong in the digital world.

 


FINAL FANTASY X

A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time
to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.

 


THIS SCENE BREAKS A CHARACTER

Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience
interprets a scene.

 


SILENT HILL TURBO HD II

I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up
making fun of fighting games. Whatever.

 


WHAT IS VULKAN?

What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of
breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?

 


FIXING MATCH 3

For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually
really broken. Until one developer fixed it.

 


OVERTHINKING ZOMBIES

Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work,
couldn't happen, and don't make sense.

 


PLAYSTATION 3

What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it
that way?

 


WHO BROKE THE IN-GAME ECONOMY?

Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the
prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the
game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?

 


WHAT DOES A ROBOT WANT?

No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we
designed them to.

 


A LACK OF VISION AND LEADERSHIP

People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they
are at it.

 


GOOD ROBOT DEV BLOG

An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.

 


NETSCAPE 1997

What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features
did they have?

 


WOLFENSTEIN II

This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to
the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on
here?

 


LOST LAUGHS IN LEISURE SUIT LARRY

Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop
being funny?

 


I WAS WRONG ABOUT BORDERLANDS 3

I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it,
but you'll have to read the article.

 


DO IT AGAIN, STUPID

One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting
gameplay.

 


THE BEST OF 2011

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.

 


CRYSIS 2

Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and
the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?

 


ZENIMAX VS. FACEBOOK

This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between
Zenimax publishing and Facebook.

 


JUVENILE AND PROUD

Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it
wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.

 


DENUVO AND THE "DEATH" OF PIRACY

Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several
months. Here's what we learned from that.

 


D&D CAMPAIGN

WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is
still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.

 


ARE LOOTBOXES GAMBLING?

Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky
hard-to-define things?

 


TOP 64 VIDEOGAMES

Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing
hipster I made one anyway.

 


PUNISHING THE INTERNET FOR SHARING

Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on
frivolous copyright claims?

 


SKYLINES OF THE FUTURE

Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this
series go next, and what changes would I like to see?

 


TRASHING THE HEAP

What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?

 


OVERUSED WORDS IN GAME TITLES

I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly
used in game titles.

 


SHAMUS PLAYS WOW

Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get
ready: They're more insane than you might expect.

 


THE OPPORTUNITY CRUNCH

No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development
isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.

 


PROGRAMMING VEXATIONS

Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming
languages, and programming problems.

 


THE GAMEPLAY IS THE STORY

Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad
cutscenes.

 


AUTOBLOGRAPHY

The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up
in the seventies, then this is for you.

 


BLACK DESERT ONLINE

This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous
monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible
progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.

 


MY MUSIC

Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur
music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.

 


ID SOFTWARE CODING STYLE

When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style
conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what
it all means.

 


PC GAMING GOLDEN AGE

It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before
crappy ports. It was glorious.

 


RAYTRACING

Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for
game development?

 


CIVILIZATION VI

I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see
what was up with this nuclear war simulator.

 


HARDWARE REVIEW

So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This
happens.

 


SPEC OPS: THE LINE

A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its
premise. How did this thing get made?

 


PROJECT BUTTON MASHER

I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame
soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.

 


STOP ASKING ME TO PLAY DARK SOULS!

An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of
Souls evangelism.

 


SPIDER-MAN

A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious,
cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?

 


BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY

A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the
underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.

 


MASS EFFECT RETROSPECTIVE

A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went
wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.

 


QUAKECON KEYNOTE 2013 ANNOTATED

An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate
it for the non-coders.

 


TENPENNY TOWER

Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew
it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.

 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT ENGINE

No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation
and disappointment.

 


BAD AND WRONG MUSIC LESSONS

A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely
knows anything about music.

 


THE WITCH WATCH

My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a
misunderstanding.

 


PUSH THE BUTTON!

Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.

 


VIDEO COMPRESSION GONE WRONG

How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all
over some videos and not others?

 


TREKROSPECTIVE

A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.

 


STOLEN PIXELS

A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has
ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.

 


THE BEST OF 2013

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.

 


RAGE 2

The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the
game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.

 


JOKER'S LAST LAUGH

Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the
ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.

 


DEAD ISLAND

A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and
bad design choices.

 


BETHESDA NEVER UNDERSTOOD FALLOUT

Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the
Fallout property.

 


PC HARDWARE IS TOAST

This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.

 


THE PLOT-DRIVEN DOOR

You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard
to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.

 


DEAR HOLLYWOOD: DO A MASH REBOOT

Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here
are some casting suggestions.

 


BEST. PLOT TWIST. EVER.

Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a
really well-executed plot twist.

 


THE BEST OF 2019

I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I
thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.

 


CHARGING MORE FOR A WORSE PRODUCT

No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works.
Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.

 


WHAT IS VULKAN?

There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?

 


QUAKECON 2011 KEYNOTE ANNOTATED

An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate
it for the non-coders.

 


TWELVE YEARS

Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very
obvious in retrospect.

 


DM OF THE RINGS

Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by
twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.

 


THE GAME THAT RUINED ME

Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard
to un-learn it.

 


GAMERS AREN’T TOXIC

This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass
stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you
shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.

 


SHAMUS PLAYS LOTRO

As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left
me deeply conflicted.

 


WHY BATMAN CAN'T KILL

His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he
inhabits.

 


FREE RADICAL

The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew
into something of a cult hit.

 


THE TERRIBLE NEW THING

Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is
over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.

 


THE BEST OF 2012

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.

 


IN DEFENSE OF CRUNCH

Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good
reasons.

 


A TELLTALE AUTOPSY

What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games
studio?

 


THE BIGGEST GAME EVER

How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a
big deal?

 


OBJECT-DISORIENTED PROGRAMMING

C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.

 


WHY THE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING SEASON IS WORSE EVERY YEAR

Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?

 


COULD HAVE BEEN GREAT

Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more
work.

 


THE DEATH OF HALF-LIFE

Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what
made these games so popular anyway?

 


SILENT HILL ORIGINS

Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails
hilariously.

 


SELF-BALANCING GAMEPLAY

There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to
prevent it. For some reason.

 


SILENT HILL 2 PLOT ANALYSIS

A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.

 


THE BEST OF 2017

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.

 


GRAND THEFT RAILROAD

Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.

 


PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOR GAMES

Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is
he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?

 


OBJECT-ORIENTED DEBATE

There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software.
Here's what they are and why people argue about it.

 


THE NO POLITICS RULE

Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will
amaze you. Or not.

 


LUDONARRATIVE DISSONANCE

What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did
it fall out of use?

 


PATREON!

Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.

 


BATMAN: ARKHAM ORIGINS

A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a
different studio.

 


CONTROL

A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing
environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its
gameplay.

 


STEAM SUMMER BLUES

This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big
publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.

 


SECRET OF GOOD SECRETS

Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.

 


GAME AT THE BOTTOM

Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of
hotbar-watching?

 


BOWLERCOASTER

Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.

 


THE MISTAKES DOOM DIDN'T MAKE

How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic
titles?

 


THE LOOT LOTTERY

What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that
have to do with slot machines?

 


IF STAR WARS WAS MADE IN 2006?

Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was
pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?

 


GAMES AND THE FEAR OF DEATH

Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.

 


ANOTHER PC GOLDEN AGE?

Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's
complicated.

 


WAS IT A HACK?

A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it
a hack?

 


BATMAN V. SUPERMAN WASN'T ALL BAD

It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look
closely you can find a few interesting ideas.

 


SEVEN SPRINGS

The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my
adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.

 


THE DUMBEST CUTSCENE

This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so
bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game
cutscenes.

 


BORDERLANDS SERIES

A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the
series can go from here.