Welcome to Design Oriented. We started in the summer of 2015 with a blog aimed to provide high quality game design analysis and criticism. We quickly realized that adding one more blog to the ocean that is games criticism wasn’t an effective way to improve the quality of conversation overall or help us connect to each other.
So we spent the last half year developing Design Oriented Search: A new way to explore games and the conversation about games. The search is now our home page.
On a full screen desktop, the default view features two columns. One is for the Catalog Critique, and the other is for the Game Breakdown database. On mobile only one column can be viewed at a time.
The Catalog Critique (CC) is a collection of articles, videos, podcasts, conference talks, etc. from around the Internet. If someone publically posts about video games, particularly about their design and their effectiveness as an art form, it belongs in the CC.
There are many different view points and voices out there when It comes to game criticism & conversation. Whatever your interest, the DO Search is designed with over 25 unique tags and labels to ensure you can search for exactly what you want. What’s more interesting is that we can simultaneously show you results for near to your interest. Results you would never have considered searching for directly.
Anytime you search you can tab over to the timeline. This is an important feature that we haven’t seen on any other search engine. Instead of thumbing through page after page of results, the timeline creates a map of the results. The vertical axis is word count and the horizontal axis is date published. Each dot is color coded by game topic. You can even mouse over or click on a dot to zip to that result page.
The Game Breakdown (GB) is a repository of game bits. No opinions. No analysis. Just the facts. As the GB grows you will be able to find handy information about a game’s design or jump endlessly between games by topic, genre, or keyword.
Have fun, and send us your feedback.
Thanks to Marcus T. Mike A., Chris S., Willy A., S. Johnathan, for building it with me.
Special thanks to Golem Greg for doing all the web magic.
