What We Do
Play This Thing (playthisthing.com) is a site that features one cool game a (week)day--along with occasional pointers to video, music, books, or other stuff of interest to gamers.
We feature games of many types: free online games; independently developed computer games; interactive fiction; tabletop (that is, non-digital) games; ARGs; Big Urban Games; and mods. All the cool stuff that's being done in games outside the normal commercial channels, in other words.
We do NOT, generally, feature commercial PC game releases from major manufacturers (they get enough ink elsewhere), mobile games, or casual games. There are some exceptions to the last rule, though: from time to time, we'll feature a game sold through casual game channels, if it either a) has strong and obvious crossover appeal to actual gamers, or b) is creative and innovative in terms of gameplay. And, anyway, you know, Jay Is Games does a great job with casual games, so good, we'll do something different.
In the course of a week, we typically cover two free games; one tabletop game (on Tabletop Tuesdays); and two games that have some kind of online free-play version, but that will cost you money if you want the full game.
How Do We Select the Games We Feature?
We meet weekly, in full evening dress, over port, Stilton, Honduran cigars, and walnuts, and engage in a highly cerebral debate, full of references to Csikszentmihalyi, Huizinga, and Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist theory, after which we make an informed judgment as to the unique artistic merits, of lack thereof, of the games under consideration.
Actually, we play 'em, and if we like 'em, we write about 'em.
Are These Reviews?
Sorta kinda. We feature games we think are cool. (In fact, one of the names we considered for the site was "Cool Game of the Day," but that sounds, I don't know, so 1990s.) A traditional reviewer plays a game and tells you whether it sucks or not. If we're telling you about games that suck, we're not doing our job. So, maybe we're offering reviews, if you think of what we're doing as only offering reviews of games we'd give a 7 or higher to--if we gave numerical scores.
(We think reviewers' scores are dumb. Instead, we let you rate the games we point to yourself.)
We don't typically offer in-depth analyses of games. The games we feature can usually be found online, and played in the browser or downloaded and played. Our job is to give you enough information to let you decide whether the game is worth checking out. And then let you check it out.
How Can I Participate?
If you know of a cool game we haven't featured, let us know! That's what the Suggest Games link at the top of the page is for.
If you're interested in writing for us, you might take a look at our writers' guidelines. Editorial contact info is included.
Let us know how we're doing in the forums.
And spread the word, of course.
What's Your Relationship to Manifesto Games?
We're owned and funded by Manifesto Games. Manifesto Games is an online retailer of independently developed PC (and Mac and Linux) games.
In principle, Play This Thing has complete editorial independence from Manifesto Games, and can say what we like. In practice, this is less clear-cut, since we're a small company, and the CEO of Manifesto Games is also the primary editor of Play This Thing.
Manifesto Games' mission and raison d'etre is to gain increased exposure for and spur greater interest in independently developed games, because we feel the mainstream industry is getting stereotyped and boring, and we think the only real hope for sustaining game creativity into the future is in promoting and celebrating the games produced by independent developers.
Because Manifesto Games is a retailer, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the Manifesto Games site to feature free games--but that's something we can do on the Play This Thing site, and sometimes very cool games are available for free.
In other words, both sites are trying to achieve the same mission, but in a different way: Manifesto Games by helping developers sell more copies of their games, Play This Thing by celebrating game creativity and building a community of enthusiasts for cool games that aren't distributed through the normal commercial channels.
When Manifesto Games offers a new game for sale on its website, that game will usually (though not always) show up on the Play This Thing website at some point. Basically, if we thought the game was cool enough to carry, we probably think it's cool enough to feature. (Not always, though.) But Manifesto inherently doesn't sell free (or tabletop) games, and Play This Thing is committed to featuring both--and we also want Play This Thing to point to all the best games available online (free or paid), so we'll happily feature games that Manifesto doesn't sell.
Messy? Well, a little bit. But look at it this well: Play This Thing is about community and content. Manifesto Games is about ecommerce. There's a relationship between us, but we also operate in very different ways.
