the99th's blog

(Danny Ledonne forwarded this to me.)

A user on the Columbinegame.com forums posted this reflection today:

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prisoner416
Post subject: My Story (Or how I almost was a statistic)

I grew up with a lot of problems. I was hyperactive, and didn't fit in well socially. I was put on various medications, saw a lot of therapists, and was transferred to many schools.

The Execution/Fruit Mystery are two games that are minimally interactive and don't have any clear goals. A lot of people would say they're not games, perhaps more would say they're insolent, pretentious wastes of time. But I'm to experimental games as Jesus was to prostitutes, I like them even if I don't buy in.

I think trying to lasso a boundary of "game" and "non-game" is not very useful at all, maybe even harmful. What happens is you get things that are game-like but become classified as "non-games" in the affirmative, like how nothing can be something... man. Except they're not nothing, and they may have value to people outside the conventional audience.

What's ironic is that both of these games use procedural rhetoric that revolves around the meta-game experience, in other words instead of trying to use rules to make a point, they use a constraint about how you have to engage the game. For Execution, you're given one verb, execute, and then sort-of half-guilted for doing the only thing you could possibly do with it. For Fruit, it insults by default while your performance doesn't make a difference. (FTW, Fruit was kinda funny at the end.) It's really easy to say these are cheap cop-outs, one-offs that should be put in the dumpster and ignored after use, like disposable diapers. And maybe they should, I don't want that nasty diaper lying around.

But consider what they can teach us -- there's a dynamic outside of agency that gives meaning to interaction. This is kinda a running theme of mine, lots of games have been wholly focused on flowing agency, now we're seeing a bunch of games that are focused solely on meta-mental tricks, phantasm, whatever you want to call it. In the same way that you can dismiss a game for being generic, you can dismiss stuff like these for being artsy-fartsy, but the generic games provided and refined patterns that are straight smack math, useful to the future, and that principle works both ways.

So, you may have noticed the lack of a tabletop tuesday review today. Yeah...

If there's anyone out there with a prolific knowledge of board games and indie RPGs, or hell, LARPs, we're all about having you come and write a review once or twice a month.

I see a lot of stuff that totally pwns but there isn't a whole lot to say about it, other than: here's how you play, you can use their heads as weapons, pwns. Still, I don't want to be this elitist pof who overlooks righteous stuff just because there isn't a lot of subtext to explore. Here's an aggregate of stuff that totally pwns:

Fake or Not? (Hot or Not, with breasts - definetly NSFW.)

8-Bit Killer (Kill pixels, FPS style)

Dan Benmergui is single-handedly galloping the standard of Argentine game development above and beyond what's been done with his innovative and poetic experiments. Last night he passed me the links for some of his new stuff, one is a single-screen RPG that uses mouse gestures for combat and critiques capitalism, and another is a open-ended toy involving photography, time-space manipulation and the relationship between a boy, a girl and a goose.

We're going to play a lit'ol game. Somebody drops killer quotes from games they think were excellent examples of quality storytelling, writing or character development, and somebody else has to name the game and drop a quote of their own. Not a game so much as an endless forest of reference. Just one rule, one quote for one answer, that way we keep the money supply from inflating. Giddyup:

"I opened the codex to a random page and read of the life of a man, not yet born, who would ressurect the mykridia and unleash horrors untold in history of myth."

"What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!"

"The Polito form is dead."

"Belief can change the nature of a man."

"The drinking water of Denver public schools is slightly hard..."

"We need more homes!"

"I hear you're quite the man about toun'. - Ah well, I like to get a little taste every now and then. - That was my daughter you bastard!"

"The president has been kidnapped, by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue him?"

"Big Monsters, Big Prizes, I Love it!"

I got a copy of Playing Columbine in the mail upon my return from the Northeast, autographed by the gnomish wizard himself. I have to say, the final cut is taut and not too long, and the extras are pretty solid.

Full disclosure: I'm in the movie, I helped Danny make parts of it, and I also lit the fuse on the game back in '06. I also gave Danny feedback on the successive cuts of the film as he was editing. However, I have no financial stake in it, and while you can make some criticisms of it (a guy making a movie about himself making a game seems like Being John Malkovich squared in terms of meta-self-indulgence, and males make up 85% of the cast) I think it came together well. I also think it's the best documentary on games yet made, better than Moral Kombat, better than that CBS-News style one whose name I forget. While those are decent things to show to your non-gamer parents/girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/friends to educate them about the emerging significance of this art form, as an already educated gamer you'll likely be turned off by the Soccer Mom aesthetic that plagues such films. Playing Columbine, however, is a nice balance between a celebration of the cutting edge of game culture and an introduction to the political, social and moral dynamics of the medium.

Man did I get a dose of the NYC rat race. Up early in Stamford, catching the train, didn't sleep until well after midnight following travel to upstate CT. But it was so worth it.

Highlights from the first major day of Games For Change 2008: