Mr D. Hon has already done the honours on this one, but since I booked the pub I feel I should also publicise it a bit: the third monthly London Gamer Geeks pubmeet will happen on 20th June (Wednesday), 6.30pm, downstairs in the College Arms on Store Street WC1. The focus is mostly but not [...]
Filed under: London, casual games, street games on May 25th, 2007 | No Comments »
Over at Extenuating Circumstances Dan Hon has already done an excellent job of liveblogging chunks of GaME 07 (Imperial College, yesterday) so I won’t duplicate his effort. I will say that it was a good day, the talks were of variable quality, and the stand-outs—as you’d expect—were David Braben talking about ‘Creating Games for the [...]
Filed under: character, conference, console, emotion, game design, narrative, rpg on May 18th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
So Hide and Seek the pervasive games festival happened over the weekend. It was a shame it was such a rainy, vile three days for it. But people seemed to have a good time regardless. And it was interesting to see a games event organised by a group with a primarily theatrical background rather than [...]
Filed under: London, game design, game philosophy, street games on May 16th, 2007 | No Comments »
(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“) Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience. Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called Starpower. Starpower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems [...]
Filed under: emotion, game design, game philosophy, geek culture, history of games, old media, online games, rpg, street games, tabletop on May 13th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
meme leav head now plskthx
Filed under: geek culture, humour, lolcat, meme on May 12th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Since the days of yore video-game magazines have given games a numerical rating. Often it’s out of ten or out of one hundred. Sometimes it has cute star-based systems and breaks things down by different categories. Whatever the system, they all suck. Back when I was editing Crazynet we picked up a reviewing system from [...]
Filed under: awards, game philosophy on May 10th, 2007 | 12 Comments »
A footnote to the post on cheating and Puzzle Quest: Jesper Juul has just posted a fantastic overview on the history of match-three-tiles games, tracing it back as far as Chain Shot in 1985. It’s not complete—it doesn’t mention Puzzle Quest or, more bizarrely, the much better known Columns (Sega, 1990)—but it does contain a [...]
Filed under: casual games, history of games on May 10th, 2007 | No Comments »
I know this is all over everywhere, but I enjoy watching people turn everyday tools into playthings. Petition asking Gov. Schwarzenegger to free Paris Hilton—as I write, 16741 signatures Petition asking Gov. Schwarzenegger to jail Paris Hilton—as I write, 29576 signatures
Filed under: information use, oh for fuck's sake, street games on May 9th, 2007 | No Comments »
Yeah, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest. The thing is, any single-player videogame actually has two roles. Firstly it provides the player with the context of the game: the setting and set-up. Secondly it provides the player with their opponents. And you, the player, automatically assume that it, the computer/game, is keeping those two things separate. [...]
Filed under: game design, game philosophy, handheld on May 9th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Mr Gideon Reeling invites your attendance at Hide and Seek, a festival of ‘pervasive street games’ this weekend (11-13 May), in and around London’s south bank. I am led to believe it will be a hoot and a half. Nothing too brain-hurty and, I hope, not too much running involved either. I am not organising [...]
Filed under: London, street games on May 9th, 2007 | 1 Comment »