Jiawei Li

For a long time, I believed that games were the ultimate narrative medium. Compared to books and films, games seem to have everything: text, visuals, sound, and most importantly, interaction. They appear to be a natural evolution—a medium that absorbs all previous forms and adds agency on top of them. From this perspective, it felt almost obvious that games should be better  at storytelling. However, after spending a semester developing a narrative game called Grey Waves , my

Many games claim to be “story-driven,” but in reality, their stories live outside of gameplay. The emotional moments happen in cutscenes. The character development happens in dialogue. The themes are delivered through scripted events. Gameplay, meanwhile, functions as a challenge system — something the player completes in order to unlock the next piece of narrative. Well，successful narrative games work differently. In the most powerful story games, gameplay is not separate fr

The randomness in Hearthstone  feels almost perfect to me. At its core, the game is deeply strategic, but instead of separating strategy and randomness, it tightly connects them. Randomness is not added on top of strategy; it is embedded inside every strategic decision. This design gives me strong satisfaction when I dynamically adjust my strategy in response to change. The constant thinking this requires fully engages my brain and makes the game deeply addictive. 1.Randomnes

I’ve played plenty of games that try to impress me with size: bigger maps, more quests, more loot, more upgrades. Outer Wilds  did something completely different. It gave me a tiny slice of time, told me it would end no matter what I did, and somehow made me feel more free than most “open world” games ever have. That’s the design question I can’t stop thinking about: Why does a fixed-length time loop feel so attractive? Why is repeating the same time window not boring—sometim