Som(a)niloquy

Manifold Publishing

There is no way that any video game or series of video games can possibly tell the stories we want to tell at Soma Games.
Neither could a graphic novel,
…or a book,
…or a movie.

If ‘the medium is the message’ then we will only have told our stories properly when they are told across multiple media, each used in its proper place to express the proper part of a manifold expression of creativity that ought to transcend any single medium. Continue Reading…

Serialized Gaming Requires Rapid Distribution

When Soma was first looking at the video game business about four years ago the biggest barrier to entry was cost and distribution. That may look like a subject-verb-mismatch but the two things are so intricately related that they might as well be seen as a single issue. Indie games cost less to make but had no realistic way to get to the public; to get out there you needed a big distribution channel, to get distributed you needed a publisher and to interest a publisher you needed to spend $500k or more.

But as I was coming to grips with this problem something new was just appearing on the scene – digital distribution. Continue Reading…

The Centrality of Beauty

Herman Melville once said “The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike him, is because they rather distrust His heart and fancy him all brain, like a watch.” Alas – how true this is that so many folks have really only heard about God’s seemingly insensitive expectations, his rules, and they have no experience with his heart.

I have a deeply held belief that our universe is far more beautiful than it is functional. I also think that God made it that way as a reflection of his own nature; that Beauty is a fundamental aspect of all reality because it is one the most essential parts of God’s heart. Continue Reading…

Heaven: The Game

This post is gonna be a little tricky. I just finished playing a new release called “Heaven” by Genesis Works. It’s a puzzle type game in the style of Myst that lets the  player explore the Throne Room city described in Revelation.

Here’s why this is gonna be hard, Heaven sits firmly in the class of video games that I deliberately want to avoid with Soma Games and it steps into several of the traps that I think have plagued this niche from the get-go. That said, I think I can take a pretty good guess as to what drives the folks who made this game and I expect it’s good stuff – they take their faith seriously and were driven to bring something they are passionate about to the medium they are passionate about, I get that. So there is this balance I want to have of honestly reviewing a product that is now out in the public in an industry I aspire to contribute to without just taking pot-shots or tearing down people who I would probably enjoy hanging out with…not an easy line. Continue Reading…

Shades of Gray

Dark Glass will lean toward the darker and morally ambiguous aspects of life as it examines grittier subjects than Soma’s previous games. Will our audience accept this state or will we be criticized for ‘loving the darkness’ too much?

Portraying Good and Evil

I ran into an interesting post the other day that asks whether or not the Nazi’s are forgivable.

The post is up and over too quickly to really chew on the question but it raises some thoughts to mind about how a story portrays good and evil. It sure seems to me that growing up and going to school was a long walk with anti-heros and deeply flawed protagonists in more or less every medium I encountered. Whether it was Frank Miller’s deeply broken Dark Knight, Lestat or Angelus – it just seems in my memory like everybody has been actively deconstructing the lines between good and evil for a long time. Continue Reading…

Can A ‘Christian Game’ Just be Fun?

I can’t tell you how many  conversations I’ve had about the qualities of this ephemeral thing called a ‘Christian Game.’

For one thing, I don’t think Soma will be making anything that would be called by that name regardless but as a man of faith the question is at least interesting to me.