Blogs

Bejeweled. Not what I was expecting.

(Danny Ledonne forwarded this to me.)

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

----------------------
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.

I don't usually pick up Boingboing links, because I figure everyone in the known universe already knows about them, but this one is too cool.

Whenever anyone says something like "Bushnell's Pong started it all," someone else inevitably says "but what about Ralph Baer?", and someone inevitably tops that with a reference to Willy Higginbotham's Tennis for Two. (Except for me; I go for John Jeffery's A Journey Through Europe, but then I view digital games as merely an extention of an artistic form that has a deeper history.)

In truth, Higginbotham's game was a one-off, an outlier, an historical curiosity, and not particularly important to the evolution of the field except that it does has undeniable precedence. Still, how cool is it to find instructions on how to build your own with nothing more than an oscilloscope and a handful of of electronic components?

(And while you're at it, go play Spacewar! -- yes, Steve Russell's original PDP-1 code, running as written, inside a Java PDP-1 emulator -- quite a cute hat-trick.)

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!"

Hrrmph. Second time it's happened -- I go to the site, and Drupal serves an error page saying there are too many mysql processes. Killing and restarting Apache and MySQL fixes the problem temporarily, but I guess something in Drupal is spawning sleeping SQL processes that never get closed out. There's no custom MySQL access in the site, so it's probably a bug in Drupal somewhere, and I don't think I want to spend the time to try to track it down. I may try upgrading to Drupal 6.0, though, in the hope that the problem's been fixed by someone else (we're using 5.7 at the moment).

I don't know how deep I'll wind up going with this, but I've posted a biography (and ludography) of Milton Bradley below. The idea is to fill out our list of eminent game designers with pages that discuss their lives and contributions to the form.

Incidentally, if you'd be interested in contributing to the effort, let me know--the contact form works for that.