social

Quite often, the people who have the most startling impact on games are one-hit wonders -- Gygax and Arneson, for example. Pace both men, but neither produced a game worth the powder to blow it to hell after D&D.

Garfield, by contrast, has certainly never designed another game with the commercial impact of Magic, but his other games, of which this one, are all worth playing.

"I wanna play Mind Fuck!" she says.

"Yeah, we can play that."

So we play.

"What am I doing?"

"Points accrue every second or so, the first person to push shift gets the points."

"Like this!?"

"Si."

Overdrive is another MySpace social game designed by Steve Meretzky (who also contributed to Nightfall: Bloodlines and is, of course, famous for his text and graphic adventure work). It's similar to other games of the style, with energy and health regenerating slowly, missions to level up and attacks on other players, an incentive to invite others to the game, and optional payment for faster advancement.

So a game I designed with Steve Meretzky launched today. It's a "social network" game, developed by You Plus, and is currently available on MySpace. A Facebook version is now live will follow later.

We're seeing the birth of a new game genre, something that doesn't happen all that often; it's already acquired the monicker of "social game," which is a terrible name, in a way. "Social games" live on social networks, hence the name, but at least to date use the social connections those networks provide in very primitive ways. And after all, all multiplayer games are social, albeit some more so than others; a game like Elven Blood is actually far less social than, say, Spades or Diplomacy or Hundred Years War, since there are few ways for players to either help or hinder each other -- and no support for 'table talk.'

World Without Oil clued me in to the realities of fossil fuel scarcity and sent me down a rabbit hole (catalyzed by the Ron Paul campaign) that lead me to understand macro-economics in the tradition of those who claim to understand quantum physics. A game inspired me to do a graduate degree´s worth of research, then lose a bunch of money in the markets by way of understanding, then do another graduate degree´s worth of research into alternative energy to come up with a viable (and game-like) solution to the global financial and energy crisis. More on that later. The point is, I´m just someone who surfs the internet a lot, and if World Without Oil could inspire me to invent a solution to near-term problems, then Superstruct might as well inspire the lot of us to solve the much more interesting and challenging problems of the longer term.

It starts with the dinner; several people are sitting around the table, represented as multicolored shapes -- squares, diamonds, circles. You tab through the up and down keys, cycling through them, learning their names, getting aquainted. Then you play with the left and right keys, moving through time. Two people leave, then another, then the dining room is empty, and the narrative unfolds. Daisy discovers the body in the study.

Rod Humble recently commented in an interview that someone should take another look at Cultivation and it's a good thing I did. Replaying this game has proven to me something I should have seen a long time ago: Jason Roher is a commie.

Who else would be inspired by a community debate involving Wal-Mart to make a game that features Kermit-The-Frog-eyed gardeners sharing resources? I don't know about you, but sharing resources isn't what I was raised to do, no free rides. And why else would he make the games characters all bi-sexual hermaphrodites? What's he trying to do to America's youth? Apparently, gardening is really important to godless hippies that couldn't appreciate the special sauce on a Big Mac if a cow came up and licked them. This game is trying to tell you that we should all just tend the earth, develop permacultures, and "share fruits" with whatever transgendered wingbat comes along. Not in my country. I like my food grown the way god intended, by pouring oil all over a field of genetically modified seeds. And I only share fruits with the ladies, sir.