I’m Celia Wagar. I write about video games regularly and this is a dumping ground for the various writings I’ve produced. I’ve played and written about games for a long time, formerly writing for the now defunct, Gather Your Party. I program in Unreal Engine & Unity and have experience as an animator with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in Animation. I currently work as an enterprise software engineer, and I teach Mastering Game Mechanics at GameDesignSkills.com.

Most of the older content here is reposts from my now defunct Ask.fm. The questions being asked are marked in bold above my plaintext replies.

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I talk about games from a perspective that gameplay is the most important part of a game. I have established a criteria for what I think makes for good gameplay from first principles. I think the best games are those that have a lot of skills to master, that push you to make interesting choices. Ones where you have to actually think about your choices, and choices can be better or worse, but it’s difficult to determine which choice is best.

I’d order my priorities for games in this order: (discussed in more detail in my standard of quality)

1. Depth
2. Challenge (for single player games, multi has challenge automatically)
3. Clear Feedback
4. Game Feel/Kinaesthetics
5. User Experience
6. [none]
7. Quality of Graphics/Sound/Animation/Story

My stance on games in a nutshell is that fun is based on uncertain successes and failures, as well as succeeding more at a task over time. Basically, you win sometimes, you lose sometimes, and over time you win more and more often. A game isn’t fun if you never win, it isn’t fun if you always win.

Depth is the number of meaningfully different and useful things you can do in a game, from which mechanics you use to the small choices of exactly how you angle or position yourself, a game with a lot of depth has a lot of things to succeed and fail at, so as you get good at one thing, there’s another thing waiting for you afterwards and you can keep going from being bad at something to being good at it for a long time.

Depth can be achieved in a bunch of different ways. It’s the total number of things that can happen, minus the ones that are redundant (the same as other things you can do), minus the ones that aren’t relevant (poorly balanced, unknown, impossible to perform, etc). Any type of game can have depth. Depth can be achieved both through having a lot of things you can do, and by adding nuances to each thing you can do. Depth is a component of the player’s options, the obstacles, and the level design, as well as how all of these things interact with each other.

My favorite games are:

If you want examples of what I’m all about, and some of my best writing, read the following:
Critpoints Glossary

Depth

Read this first: GameDesignSkills.com What is Game Depth and How to Evaluate It

Games for Learning About Depth
Micropositioning: Another Source of Depth
Simple Actions with a lot of Depth
Building Counterplay for PVP Games
Transitive (Efficiency Race) vs Non-Transitive (Rock Paper Scissors)

Reviews and Notes on games

Mirror’s Edge Review
Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy Review
Pseudoregalia Review
The Big Catch: Tacklebox Review
Halo: Combat Evolved Review
Halo 2 Review
Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild Review
Hollow Knight Review
Mario Odyssey Review

Other

People Aren’t Random
Mind Games via Mirror Neurons
Riddles, Puzzles, and Games
What Makes a Dynamic Platformer?
Review All Games As If They’re New
Nuzzles: Not a Puzzle
Gamedevs Should Not (Exactly) Copy My Criteria to Make a Successful Game
Emergent Gameplay in Fighting Games
Designing for Speedrunners
Designing AGAINST Speedrunners
Roger Ebert was Right About Video Games and We Have Failed Him

Mechanical Analysis

The Issues/Joys of Parrying
Parries are the Mindkiller
Changes to Fix Melee Weirdness
Hitstun in Stunning Detail
5 Games 5 Jumps
Taking Apart Stealth
Stealth Game Distraction Tools
The Majesty of Dark Souls 3’s Backstab
How iFrames Augment Dodge Rolls
Understanding Framedata: Combos, Traps, and Turns
What’s the Deal with Auto Combos?