Every genre is only one game

 Posted by (Visited 17457 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Apr 122013
 

Well, sort of. I really mean “systemic game” and I am really talking only about game systems here.

So let me preface this by saying that this article’s title is hyperbolic exaggeration. It uses the term “game” in my annoyingly formal, reductionist way. But I want to say it anyway, for the sake of the provocation; framing it this way jars some preconceived notions about terms out of my head. (At some point, I’ll do a post here about finding alternate, less loaded terms. But for now, since I want to get this out, I’m running with it.)

If you take as given that a game can be analyzed in terms of its grammatical structure — the verbs, nouns, adjectives that make it up – then it leads to the natural thought that you might get the same structure with minor variations.

  • This is a rose.
  • This is a blue rose.
  • This is a red rose with whitish leaves.
  • This is a thorny rose with a strong aroma.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; a rose is a rose is a rose.

And an FPS is an FPS is an FPS.

(Is this reductionist? Absolutely. It discounts all the things that sit on top of the same skeleton and make them radically different player experiences. But bear with me a moment).

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A Letter to Leigh

 Posted by (Visited 48046 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Apr 092013
 

when people say games need objectives in order to be ‘games’, i wonder why ‘better understanding another human’ isn’t a valid ‘objective’

games need ‘challenges’ and ‘rules’, isn’t ’empathy’ a challenge, aren’t preconceptions of normativity a ‘rule’

–  Leigh Alexander writing on Twitter

Dear Leigh,

I have such a complicated emotional response to this. And I think you like getting letters, based on what I see on the Internet.

I would rate better understanding of another human and the challenge of empathy as bare minimum requirements for something reaching for art.

The assumptions underlying this question are the interesting thing. A game of bridge demands great understanding of another human, and great synchrony of thought. A huge number of the games of childhood are designed to teach empathy. We play games all the time in order to get to know people.

But that’s not what you really mean, is it. What you are really talking about is something else entirely.

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My first game

 Posted by (Visited 7990 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Apr 032013
 

At PAX East, there was a panel where a bunch of devs talked about their first games. They asked me and a few others to send in a video… and this is what I sent them.

The saga of how I managed to make it, though, is a little more intricate, involving copying all my Atari 8-bit floppies to PC. I used the USB SIO2PC interface from Atarimax to connect the floppy drive direct to the PC.  I then captured video directly within Altirra. Some of the disks were dead, alas, but I was able to recover about a half dozen games and partial games that I wrote when I was 14 and 15. Maybe at some point I’ll do posts on them.

You also get to see a glimpse of what was my real bootcamp in game design. It wasn’t the videogames. Frankly, I wasn’t a good enough programmer to make great games, really, and so a lot of the games were clone-like in a lot of ways. A truly ridiculous amount of them consist of nothing more than the title screen. No, it was the boardgames I did as a kid that in retrospect really taught me the basics… I must have made several dozen, and they’d get playtested during recess periods at school. At some point, I will definitely do a post about those. I still have many of them.

Moving on from Playdom/Disney

 Posted by (Visited 14238 times)  Game talk
Apr 022013
 

015-shrunkAs of today, I am an unemployed game developer!

It was in the summer of 2006 that I founded Metaplace in a spare bedroom. By 2007, we had built an amazing, deeply involved community, and a powerful platform. By 2009, we had failed to make money at it and were forced to shut it down. Since then I’ve been privileged to see several of the folks from that community go on to join the industry and do great work.

We switched to social games. In the space of six months, we launched three of them. I still get emails asking for the return of My Vineyard. We introduced some real innovations to Facebook gaming, and were quickly acquired.

Then came two and a half years with Playdom and Disney. So much learning! Amazing views into metrics and science and the mass market from Playdom. That incredible culture of creativity and deep commitment to values at Disney. I held a frame from Steamboat Willie in my hands. I watched everyday people who never thought of themselves as gamers wake up to the power of games. And above all, I worked with many wonderful people.

Now it feels like time to apply the things I learned.

So, I am off on my own!

What’s next?

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