Game Idea Giveaway - Monk Tactics

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by kcaz_rel:

• what sort of game idea you're looking for
  I'm not quite sure, something simple but with a twist an idea I had was a sort of physics RPG.
  

• what your goals are in making this game
  Again a new twist that is completely different from what you would expect.
  

• what games you've made already
  A tower defense, a few small platformers, I tried a physics game.
  

• your favorite Flash games
  Games with choice. TD's
  

• your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
  Only really programming, but I'l prob. get a partner to do art.
  

• your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
  Programming, :p

The weird idea: Paint Physics

The normal idea: Monk Tactics

You know tower defense games. They take one aspect of real-time strategy - base building - and extrapolate it out into a full game. Base building is fun, but why don't we try taking another component of real-time strategy gameplay and turn that into a game? Something kind of opposite and complementary to tower defense, maybe... I know - how about the part where you command a squadron of soldiers to invade an enemy base? But there has to be a little more than that - after all, we've see that sort of thing before. How about this - have you ever played Age Empires? In the first level of the Babylonian campaign, Holy Man, you start out commanding a single, vulnerable priest unit on the edge of an enemy village. Priests convert enemy units to your side. So in order to build up your army, you must sneakily convert units from the enemy base, penetrating further into their defenses as your squad grows, and being exposed to stronger and stronger enemy units. Sound fun? That's the basic idea behind Monk Tactics.

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Selexion

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by venomblood:

• what sort of game idea you're looking for
  Shooting, action, evolution, strategy
  

• what your goals are in making this game
  A game that brings a new idea to the internet, with unique emotions, themes, and gameplay

The normal idea: Bubblebomb

The weird idea: Selexion

In short, the concept is abstract top-down shooter (like Geometry Wars) exploring the dynamics of evolution by sexual selection. Uh, yeah. If the game Coil offends you, don't read the rest of this. ;) But really, this is meant to be as clean and abstract as possible while retaining the core of the evolutionary dynamics that occur between the two sexes of a species.

There are two types of creatures in the world: males and females. Males look like triangles, like the outline of a slice of pizza that's been cut into eight or twelve slices. The pointy end is forward, as in Asteroids, and the males shoot from the pointy end (hence the shooting-ness of this game). Playing as a male, your creature would rotate to point toward the mouse cursor and accelerate toward it if the mouse button is not pressed. Pressing the mouse button would both put on the brakes to slow down your creature, as well as shoot bullets like a normal shooting. Females look like a pizza or stop sign with a slice taken out of it (so a male and female together would make a single circle or octagon). The opening is forward, which rotates to point toward the mouse cursor and accelerates very slowly toward it if the mouse button is not pressed. Much like in the game flOw, pressing the button accelerates the creature toward the cursor somewhat faster, rather than shooting.

The point of the game is to accumulate as many offspring as possible. Gameplay occurs in timed rounds, for each generation. For the first round, you can choose your creature from a small random set of individuals. All your offspring that survive to the end of the round are added to your total score, and one of them is chosen randomly to be your creature in the next round. This motivates you to choose your mates a bit more carefully, to ensure that you are not stuck with a sickly and weak creature in the next round. And of course, it forces you to experience the game from both the female and male perspectives. During a round, your creature could be colored blue, other creatures in red, and your juvenile offspring in purple, perhaps. There would need to be at least three colors, anyway - maybe you can come up with a better scheme. :p

Creatures can attack each other. Females are larger and stronger than males, though less nimble, so they attack by ramming (avoiding the opening, which is not armored). Females cannot shoot. Males can ram too, but they are smaller and usually just shoot to attack. As you may have suspected however, bullets serve a dual purpose. If the bullet is shot into the opening (the missing slice) of a female, there is a chance that the female will be impregnated. If this occurs, a baby creature is formed from the genetic material of its two parents, plus a mutation or two. As in the game Cultivation, the new creature gestates for some amount of time (more than a few seconds, less than a minute) inside its mother before it is born and takes its place in the world as a nonreproductive juvenile creature. A pregnant female is slower and more vulnerable than normal.

There is also food in the world, in the form of small squares that spin across the screen like in Evolites. Creatures can eat food by touching it, which they must do every so often to keep their energy meters high. These energy meters drain very slowly over time (faster during pregnancy) and also serve as a creature's heath bar when shot or rammed. When it reaches zero, the creature dies. All these physical properties of the creatures, like energy meter size, draining speed, armor strength, body size, acceleration rate, maximum speed, fire rate, bullet speed, bullet size, fertility, gestation time, would be variables in the genome of each creature.

So we have here a minimal but quite expressive system in which many interesting evolutionary dynamics may emerge. The problem is that in order to take advantage of it, the creatures must have some quite sophisticated behavioral AI that also can be encoded within their genome, or you must design a multiplayer game in which human brains take the place of evolution in exploring the strategic space. I have some ideas toward a solution but nothing completely defined. If you are sufficiently interested I would be glad to elaborate on how this system could be turned into an actual game. :)

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

Game Idea Giveaway - Bubblebomb

...continued from The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Request by venomblood:

• what sort of game idea you're looking for
  Shooting, action, evolution, strategy
  

• what your goals are in making this game
  A game that brings a new idea to the internet, with unique emotions, themes, and gameplay
  

• what games you've made already
  TopDownShooters, Sidescrolling shooting games, life simulator, card game, puzzle game, minuscule platform experience
  

• your favorite Flash games
  Games that entertain me from the beginning, and possess a consistent style. The gameplay element of "shooting"
  

• your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
  Game design = %60, Programming = %80, Art = %60, Sound = %50, in terms of how well I am with them
  

• your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound
  Prefer making a game involving coding. I prefer to avoid animation/sound/art as a required part of the main gameplay. I also would like to avoid physics based games for coding purposes.

The weird idea: Selexion

The normal idea: Bubblebomb

In short, the concept is top-down arena shooter plus match-three bubble popper (like Puzzle Bobble). Instead of shooting normal bullets, you shoot colored balls that stick to your opponents and accumulate Katamari-style on their bodies. When a ball hits, if it creates a group of three or more adjacent balls of the same color, those balls explode, dealing damage to the opponent they're attached to. Any balls that get detached are then sucked back toward that opponent so that they reattach, possibly setting off more explosions that do even more damage. The strategy of setting up combos of explosions just from one shot is exactly the gameplay of most match-three casual games, motivated by impressive score multipliers (in this case damage multipliers) for each subsequent explosion in the chain reaction.

I had originally imagined this as a simple multiplayer arena game, where each player is running around with a bunch of colored balls on their back, trying to trigger explosions on the other players while avoiding getting shot themselves. However, I think it could work equally well as a single player game, with waves of different types of enemies, and bosses and such. Enemies could vary in their base body shapes, resistance to certain colors of balls, shooting pattern and bullet type, movement pattern and speed, and of course the basics like health and armor. Bosses might be able to shake off or clear balls from their bodies, in addition being bigger and stronger and having more advanced AI. Hey, if you want, you could even have the enemies evolve in a simple genetic algorithm-ish way, since you're interested in evolution. Let me know if you want ideas on that.

I can imagine lots of possibilities for powerups, special abilities and upgrades. The concept is pretty easily extensible, and would be compatible with most special abilities found in normal shooting games. One simple variation I'd add to the player's arsenal is the ability to lay down balls like mines, instead of just shooting them, which would attach to whatever runs into them and possibly trigger an explosion like a normal bullet ball. There's also the question of whether the ball bullets bounce off walls and objects or whether they'd stick. Maybe certain objects would be sticky, or instead maybe certain weapons would shoot bouncy balls. There's also the question of how ball color is determined. If it's like most match-three games, the color of the next ball would be randomly chosen, displayed prominently perhaps at the end of the player's gun. Often, the color of the second ball is also shown, to help the player plan ahead, and also so that there can be a special button that will swap the current and next ball color. If you'd like to go with this idea, I'd recommend downloading and trying out a bunch of free demos of casual games in the match-three genre. Let me know if you want recommendations.

Want an idea? Make a request on The Game Idea Giveaway Thread!

The Game Idea Giveaway Thread

Early in January, I created The Game Idea Giveaway Thread on the MochiAds community forums. Since then, I've been pleasantly surprised at the amount of encouragement and interest that this endeavor has attracted. I thought I'd start publishing the ideas here on my blog as well, to bring them to a wider audience.

Status Summary

So far, 16 developers have requested an idea.

• venomblood: Bubblebomb, Selexion
• kcaz_rel: Monk Tactics, Paint Physics
• Mini Chris: Swan Song, Bacon Frenzy
• Oknavi: Drifter
• Incrue: Pique
• freelanceflashgames: Lava Land, Garden Chomp
• TobiHeidi: Gridslime, Random Lulz
• IvyGames: Randori, Salmon Song
• FullerGames: Collink, Tumblestack
• triqui: City Basher
• kokosan: Metastability, Prejudice
• Geekman: Freetrace, Databomb
• rudy_sudarto: City of Reeds, Spherecraft
• Cam: Scale Up, Can Has Cake
• Danny: Refreshment Defense, Poong

Check back for updates!

Introduction

I recently decided to write a list of all the Flash game ideas I've thought of over the past few years. I was somewhat alarmed to find that I had a frighteningly large number of them - close to one hundred distinct ideas, some good, some bad - and realized that I'd never have time to make them all. So, I went about putting the games into various categories in order to prioritize and figure out which ideas are most important to me and which I don't really care about so much. I ended up with maybe 45 ideas that are special to me, plus a couple from other people I'm collaborating with.

That leaves me with around 50 ideas that I most likely will never make. I've decided that I'd like to start giving them away to game developers in need. If you're a developer who needs an idea, this is the place to post your request. Tell me what you're looking for and I'll see if I have a game concept that fits your need. And if any other developers would like to join in and contribute their own ideas to the pool, that would be great too.

I'm doing this because I'd hate to see all these ideas go to waste. And if I can help some people out by giving these ideas away for free, great. Just to be absolutely clear, I don't want money for this, but I do ask that if you use an idea that I give you, please have a credits page in your game and put "axcho" in it somewhere. Somewhere visible, preferably. ;)

Instructions

Looking for a game idea that you can implement, modify, or just be inspired by? Let me know and I'll do my best to provide you with the concept that's right for you.

If you want me to send you a game idea, please tell me...

• what sort of game idea you're looking for
• what your goals are in making this game
• what games you've made already
• your favorite Flash games
• your abilities in game design, programming, art, and sound
• your preferences in game design, programming, art, and sound

The more specific you are in describing what you want, the easier it will be for me to help you. In particular, it would be very helpful if you could let me know how comfortable you are developing with multiplayer, physics-based, music-based, and 3D gameplay.

Update:
The Game Idea Giveaway Thread is currently closed to new requests! I'll consider opening it up again once I've finished filling all the existing requests.

Global Game Jam Notes

The Global Game Jam begins today! Game developers are convening in major cities around the world to spend the next 48 hours collectively cranking out some intriguing new games. That's the idea, at least. Sadly, I won't have the time to participate in this exciting event, let alone journey to some far-off city for this purpose.

However, there is one consolation for us who must watch from the sidelines. That is, the most excellent keynote presentation video by Kyle Gabler of World of Goo and Experimental Gameplay Project fame, with seven tips on How to Make a Game in 48 Hours. It was awesome. You must watch it.

I wrote up some notes on it. I did it more to help myself remember and process the information than for anything else, but I thought I'd post them here as well. Maybe glance over them before and after watching the video. Or better yet, write up your own. :)

My notes on
Kyle Gabler's 7 easy tricks on
How to Make a Game in 48 Hours

7. "Adjust Expectations"

• Don't compete with big-budget games.
  
• Create a new category and excel in it.
• Introduce one new idea quickly and clearly.
  

6. "Create a Low Barrier of Entry"

• Make it fun in the first fifteen seconds.
  
• Title screen, one sentence instructions, then play.
• Or combine two of those. Or have all three at once.
  

5. "Feel Something"

• Find a song that inspires an emotion in you.
• Choose graphics, sound, and design to reflect it.
• Use the mechanics to present a deeper theme.
  

4. "Make the TOY First"

• Find out whether your idea is actually fun.
• First test the mechanics with placeholder art.
• If it's fun, then add graphics and sound.
  

3. "shhh..."

• Make use of sound as much as graphics.
  
• It can be just as effective, with less effort.
  

2. "harmony"

• Don't create a lot of graphics and sound.
• Use few elements that work well together.
  

1. "Never Fall in Love"

• Embrace the possibility of failure.
  
• Feel free to mangle and transform your original idea.

Kyle Gabler's 2nd Theorem of DESTRUCTION

"as love and effort INCREASE,
the probability of SELF DESTRUCTION approaches 1"

There you have it. I've tried to rephrase his advice into direct, concrete actions that you can easily begin to put into practice. I'm definitely eager to see how I might apply these to my own projects. :) I'd say I'm already pretty good with tips 2 and 5, but I'm still struggling with that number 1... :p

How about you?

Story in Games

Henry Jenkins is one of my favorite authors writing about games, along with a few others such as Ian Bogost and Daniel Cook. But you're not as likely to find his writing on the web. Well, maybe you are, but that's not how I came across it. :p

One piece of his, which you may not have encountered since it was published as an academic paper rather than a blog post or online article, is called Game Design as Narrative Architecture. It examines four ways that story can be expressed through gameplay, and I found it very inspiring when I read it. I thought I'd share my notes here. :)

Spatial Stories and Environmental Storytelling

Evocative Spaces
ex: American McGee's Alice

• play on existing mental mappings
• fill in broadly the spaces and moods to evoke earlier mental images formed by previous storytelling experiences
• story information spread across books, film, television, comics, games, etc.

Enacting Stories
ex: I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors

• let players perform or witness narrative events
• broadly defined goals and conflicts
• obstacles and affordances facilitate player's movement to resolution
• enact specific, localized incidents or micronarratives - shape emotion
• compelling framework vs. local freedom

Embedded Narratives
ex: Myst

• linear backstory separate from nonlinear experience of player
• find bits of evidence to reconstruct understanding of the backstory, and test these mental maps against game world
• distributing information across the game space, redundantly
• can mix enacted and embedded narratives
• melodrama based on the external project of internal states - spaces of mood, feeling, not just factual information

Emergent Narratives
ex: The Sims

• stories emerge from player's experience with the system
• the system is simplified, designed to maximize narrative possibilities
• characters with desires, needs that can come into conflict, with emotional responses to events, and consequences to their choices
• designing spaces to have poetic and symbolic potential

In Summary

evoked - new perspective on existing story

enacted - story about movement through space

embedded - discover and reconstruct story from clues

emergent - create new stories from experience

I think that games have barely scratched the surface in storytelling. If someone tells you that games can't tell stories, or that there's only one way for games to tell a story, well, I'd say they're not looking very hard. There is quite a bit of interesting experimentation going on if you know where to look. The Path and (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors are just two recent examples. Distributed narratives make up another intriguing offshoot. It's all very fascinating to me.

Another paper by Jenkins, very thought-provoking, is "Complete Freedom of Movement": Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces. It's fairly long, but well worth the read. Take a look! :)

The Dejeweled Development Blog

So... Dejeweled.

This is a project I've been involved in for a while now. It started way back in June of 2007 when I was still looking for game ideas featuring ragdoll physics. One forumgoer, then known as Exilement, presented to me the idea which would soon go by the name of Dejeweled. The next day, I created a forum thread to begin collecting more feedback and suggestions on this new concept. The response was unprecedented, unanimously positive, and the thread began filling up with praise, ideas, and impatient demands for a release date.

Nearly two years and over 800 posts later, the game is still without a release date. I had thought I could seriously get started at the beginning of 2008, but nothing much came of it. Now, 2009 has begun, Exilement is now known as Prospect, and I'm thinking there's a chance that I could actually make some progress on the project this year. Like, starting now.

So I've set up a blog, where I can post updates, concept art and prototypes for the satisfaction of the project's hopeful fans, disillusioned as they may be at the moment. I present to you the Dejeweled Development Blog. I've been working on some prototypes lately, so with any luck there will be some new stuff there pretty soon.

Oh, I haven't actually explained the idea yet. Here:

Dejeweled is a rather excessively violent game wherein the player is compelled to construct mechanical contraptions which contrive to cruelly kill, destroy, and slaughter innocent jewel-filled ragdolls in clever and amusing ways.

More questions? Read this. Let me know what you think! :)

An Inaugural Experiment

You know those annoying forum signatures, those chain letter-ish ones that say something like, "98% of all teenagers have smoked pot. If you are one of the 2% who haven't, copy and paste this into your signature." Or the old classic, "I believe in Jesus Christ my Savior. If you do too, paste this into your signature."

Well, how about this?

I believe in Barack Obama as my personal savior. If you do too and aren't afraid to admit it, copy and paste this into your signature.

Time for me to update my deviantART sig and spread the word! ;) Feel free to join in.

I'm very curious to discover who will be offended by this and how much. Let's see what happens. :D

Making Murder Less Satisfying

I haven't ever seen this done before. What if there were a game, a violent game where you shoot your enemies to incapacitate or kill them, but instead of collapsing or exploding when shot, these enemies fall to the ground screaming and writhing in pain, like worms in a frying pan?

• I would never put a worm in a frying pan. In fact, I'm starting to feel horribly sick just thinking about it... *shudder*

In most games, the visceral feedback of a kill is satisfying because there is a finality to it that tells the player they've accomplished something, that there is now one less danger to worry about. But what if the incapacitated enemy did not simply transmute into a passive, inert background prop but instead continued to thrash violently, screaming and crying out in agony? Despite now being completely worthless in gameplay terms, this enemy would remain, loudly demanding the player's attention. I imagine such a reaction would render the act of killing much less satisfying.

As writhing, wailing enemies accumulate on the screen, tension would increase almost unbearably, like the music in the game Lucid State Dreaming. I wonder how easily a player could become desensitized to such disturbing consequences. Is it inevitable? Could you design a game to prevent such desensitization?

*image from the sublimely horrifying Madness Combat 4: Apotheosis*

Adventures in Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming is a pretty fascinating phenomenon. You may have heard of it. A lucid dream is one where you realize that you are dreaming and thus can consciously control what happens to you. They are often more vivid than normal dreams, depending on how "lucid" or self-aware you can be throughout the experience.

What I find particularly interesting is the way that you influence a dream. To make something happen or come into being in the dream world, you expect it to be so, until it is. This says a lot about how perception operates. If you're interested in learning more, I'd recommend starting with the book On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. It presents what is probably the most viable hypothesis that I've yet come across for how the brain actually learns and makes predictions. Read it and reflect upon this connection between expectation and perception in lucid dreaming. Perhaps you will notice some similarities in your waking life.

Training yourself to have lucid dreams is not easy. I have had only one lucid experience that I can confirm with any certainty, and it happened without any planning on my part. Apparently, it was triggered by what they call the wake-back-to-bed technique. Fortunately, I keep a notebook by my bed for moments like these, and upon waking, I was able to write down what I observed before the memory of the dream vanished completely. You may find it an interesting study. :)

2008/10/24
I had a lucid dream. Or at least, I dreamed that I was having a lucid dream. The experience was considerably less lucid than my true waking state, but it was more lucid than my usual dreaming state. I had this dream after going back to bed after my alarm went off, so I must have had that idea of lucid dream close to mind when I went to sleep.

When the lucid segment began, I was imagining that this was a French king's house, whose cooks were one by one presenting dishes and desserts they had made and were not going to let me eat, me being no guest of the king. But then one of the cooks seemed to recognize me as the king because he let me in and started telling me about all the various dishes he could prepare for me. During this time I was wondering whether I'd be able to taste anything while dreaming, and then managed to conjure up the taste of salami. This was my first lucid act.

Shortly after this, I found myself in my own familiar kitchen, frantically looking at all the digital clocks to test for dream-ness, increasingly ignoring the cook talking to me. Sure enough, the clocks would show drastically different times upon subsequent inspection, with the exception of the microwave time whose dial was being turned and whose numbers were increasing regularly while this motion occurred.

Then I decided to look out the windows and conjure up a lush green setting. It took a moment or two for the view to solidify, but when it did the weather outside was raining hard and the trees were leafy and wet and lush. Sitting on the fence were several turkeys, calling. They may have been vultures. I'm not sure where they came from - I certainly didn't ask for turkeys!

While in the kitchen I found that I had to keep moving my attention, or a sort of blankness of mind would loom where I rested my gaze, threatening to toss me into a new dream devoid of any lucidity. The experience of lucidity in the dream was thus like the experience of being deep in the computer screen, tired, on the web for several hours - I had some capacity for conscious decision-making, but much less than normal.

I don't remember dreaming of falling asleep afterward, but I do remember dreaming that I had woken up. Not that I bothered to go through the experience of finding myself in bed and getting out of it - I just seemed to have hit a switch that told me I was no longer lucid dreaming, and therefore concluded that I must be awake, which I was not.

Eventually, I really did wake up and immediately wrote all this down before I forgot what happened. And so, here we are.

Interestingly, I often find that while dreaming I implicitly understand that I am in a dream, though I only rarely become explicitly conscious of the fact. So if someone in the dream were to say to me, "Are you dreaming?" I would be likely to reply with, "Yes, of course," and then continue on as if nothing unusual had been revealed. About a year earlier I had one dream that illustrates this fairly well. I thought it was rather poetic. :p

2007/09/10
At one point in my dream, I was outside on a sort of grassy ridge or hill overlooking a large, dark brown building that had been the focus of the dream events previous. I climbed up onto the top of a chain link fence there, and looked up at the bright, but cloudy and overcast sky. I had an implicit understanding that I was dreaming, but was not particularly conscious of it.

I decided, perhaps to get away from the place that I was in, that I would like to fall towards the sky if I let go, rather than back toward the earth. I knew that since I was dreaming, it would happen that way if I believed it would. So I imagined myself falling up towards the sky and convinced myself that I would do so.

Then I let go, and fell through the sky. It didn't hurt as much as I expected. I'm not sure, but I believe that I ended up in a new dream place then.

Dreams are pretty awesome. They make for a good discussion topic if you want to have a meaningful conversation with someone you don't know very well. Strangely enough, I've found that people are often eager to share their dreams and hear about other people's dream experiences even when they might be bored or uncomfortable discussing other topics.

Games and Perceptual Apathy

A while ago I had an interesting discussion with Krystian Majewski on his blog post about The Hardships of Location-Based Games. He's been working on a game called Illucinated, which uses real photographs for its graphics so he has to actually venture out into the real world, at night, and sneak past security guards and giant spiders and such to acquire these precious goods. Someday, I hope to be as cool as that.

But in the meantime, I can write about it. One reason games are cool is that they change the way you look at things, as this article suggests. At the very least, they change the way you look at things on the screen, which goes from a confusing mess to a dazzling field of opportunities and dangers. And if the game takes place in the real world, well, that's where things get interesting. As Krystian Majewski commented about his game-like outdoor excursions, "You start seeing places in different ways. Going by some piece of architecture you wonder how it will look in the night and you start appreciating seemingly mundane routes in the cityscape."

That sounds like fun. Wouldn't it be cool if there were games specially designed to enhance your experience of the real world, designed to let the fun from the game itself spill over into your real life? Let's see what we had to say about it, way back in 2008.

axcho said...

• That sounds so much more exciting than anything I'm doing. Thanks for that 10 Gnomes link - really interesting. I never realized people were doing things like this, except maybe IvoryDrive. I like these games using real-world environments and visuals and such - lets you use your perception to a much fuller extent than usual on the computer.
  
  Speaking of perception, I really like that last paragraph, about the activity becoming like a game and restructuring the way you see the world around you. In fact, I'll quote it right here because I like it so much:
  
  "But the experience is amazing at the same time. It brings so much physical experience into the Game Design. It becomes almost like a game itself. Like a strategic version of Parkour. You start seeing places in different ways. Every time you see a path in the bushes your reflexes to investigate kick in. Going by some piece of architecture you wonder how it will look in the night and you start appreciating seemingly mundane routes in the cityscape."
  
  This way that games can force your perception to come alive and appreciate what's there is something I'm really excited about. Once people have a framework of goals and interpretation of affordances and obstacles, their perception starts popping out in ways corresponding to the game structure. I'd even say that all of perception can be thought of as structured and brought into being by games, for a rather loose definition of "games".
  
  One thing that really opened up my perception with respect to appreciating the world around me, particularly plants, was when I started making musical instruments out of bamboo. I'd start noticing bamboo wherever I went, evaluating based on size and quality for harvesting and such, practically salivating at the sight of the better specimens. It turned me on to the aesthetic qualities of bamboo.
  
  Then as I learned about L-systems I started noticing the aesthetic qualities of other plants. And once I started browsing deviantART and doing photography I became even more aware. Going through the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain opened it way up, and so the process has continued, until I can see just about everything around me as beautiful, if I take the time to do so.
  
  I want to use games to help people see the beauty around them (among other things). A few games to start punching some holes in one's perceptual apathy, and hopefully the process will accelerate... The interesting thing is that it often takes exposure to a new environment (like a new game, or a vacation to another place) where your old perceptual habits and blindness does not apply, in order for you to start opening up. At first I would take photos only on vacations, but then I eventually started seeing the beauty of my everyday world. I want to be able to make games that allow people to transfer their transformed perception back to daily life.
  
  In short, I am inspired by your bold exploration and reinterpretation of the real, physical world you exist in. I wish I would let myself spend more time in the real world instead of squeezing my mind into such a small computer screen every day.
  
  I think that's my cue to stop typing. ;) Thanks.
  August 30, 2008 11:28 PM

Krystian Majewski said...

• Wow, thanks for the detailed comment! I've noticed IvoryDrive over on Kongregate. Interesting how he seemed to have similar experiences. These 6 messages could come just as well from me.
  
  I noticed too how getting out - especially on vacation - usually inspires me to do games. I know that I'm not alone too - the first Prototype of Braid was also created on holidays.
  
  As for noticing things. I guess this is some kind of reverse-inattentinal blindness. I noticed it too on several occasions but it never occurred to me that you could use games to intentionally to "teach" people to see things differently. Good thinking! Another good reason for using real environments.
  August 31, 2008 3:37 AM

axcho said...

• Oh, you're welcome. I guess it had been too long since I had written a decent blog post of my own, so I went ahead and relieved myself on yours. :p
  
  IvoryDrive's an interesting guy. I don't think I'm cool or exciting enough to be like you or him, but at least I can admire from the sidelines. ;)
  
  Reverse-inattentional blindness is basically what I'm talking about, yes. I've come to believe quite strongly that being able to put more conscious effort into perception, and to be rewarded by finding beauty, is a very important skill to have.
  
  As another dA artist artbytheo said to me, (and I hope he doesn't mind if I quote him here)
  "...I think what's happening in our world today is that 'they' are trying to convince everyone the world is a horrible place. 'They' want us to keep our eyes closed and not see the world is actually a beautiful place, so we keep watching 'their' stupid tv shows, news broadcasts, and buy endless supplies of clothes, cars, and other useless shit.
  
  The goal of the game would then be to make people realize this."
  
  And as he clarified later,
  "There really isn't a 'them' as an evil body of powerful rulers that is actually controlling the show. It's all of us working all together in a huge body called humanity (and smaller cultural bodies of course)."
  
  Reading books such as Awareness by Anthony De Mello, and Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn, is what has really focused my thinking on this subject.
  
  You'd think I'd have enough on my plate trying to make cool new experimental games and games to transform education without also trying to use games to get people to open up their perception and save the world... :p
  
  Anyway, I still owe you an email about the Adopt an Invader concept. I'll start on that right now.
  September 2, 2008 2:56 PM

How about that? The world is a beautiful place... if you can learn to see it. Are you ready? :)

A few games to start punching some holes in one's perceptual apathy, and hopefully the process will accelerate...

Designing for Virtual Item Sales

Interested in making money through selling in-game items directly to players instead of relying on advertising? Flash portals like Nonoba and Kongregate are starting to make it possible to easily integrate microtransactions into your games. But I've never really seen a discussion of the special design issues that come up for a game using virtual item sales. What follows are my notes on the subject from a presentation by a GoPets representative a few years ago.

Role of Items (in multiplayer games)

Why would a player want to buy an item? Here are a few reasons.

• to Enhance Status
  ex: clothing, medals, pets, houses
  
  May also affect the UI, like a game replay recorder that you wear.

• to Provide an In-game Advantage
  ex: enhanced weapons, armor, speed, accuracy, food
  
  Usually provide a mild effect, for the sake of balance.
  Often they are consumable, rather than permanent.
  
  ex: new skills or combos
  

• to Provide Deeper Controls
  ex: extra spell slots, advanced hotkeys
  
  Allow harder-core, more skilled players to have more nuanced control, with a cost of increased difficulty and complexity.
  

• Rare Items to Sell Back
  ex: special premium items, items from raffles or lotteries
  
  Special occasions like holidays are good times to give out limited edition items.
  

Item Duration

Not all items last forever. Keep that money flowing! :p

• Consumed - use once (but may buy large quantities)
  ex: food, potions, grenades
  

• Charge - buy refills in order to use
  ex: bullets for a gun, batteries for a calculator, armor that must be repaired
  

• Rent - use for a limited time period or duration
  ex: demo skis, effects of a magic spell
  

• Permanent - unlimited use
  ex: clothes, decorations, tools
  

There may be a leveling tree to unlock access to new items.

Balancing Methods

Don't let the items you sell upset the balance of the game.

• Defensive items (temporary shields) should be bought, while offensive items (missiles) should be found in game.
  
  This is psychologically more acceptable than the reverse.
  

• Rental items, limited edition items, and item buyback by the game can be used to minimize the effect of poorly balanced items introduced into the game world.
  
  Item buyback is when players can directly exchange their items for game currency, and the items are then taken out of circulation completely. If an unbalancingly powerful item is mistakenly introduced, it is often better to offer players appealing amounts of game currency in exchange, rather than doing nothing or forcibly removing the items.

Multiple Currencies

In order to prevent gold-farming, players must not be able to simply convert from one currency to another. They should be able to trade with other players however, such that the amount of currency in circulation remains stable. See this article for further explanation.

• for time-rich people
  ex: green shells in GoPets, awarded through normal gameplay (an equivalent of experience points)
  
  This is the simplest, most obvious sort of way for players to earn currency. Basically every game uses it.
  

• for money-rich people
  ex: gold shells in GoPets, directly acquired by putting in real money
  
  This is the way you actually make money. Any game relying on an item-based business model must use it.
  

• for idea-rich people
  ex: pink shells in GoPets, awarded for creating icons for the pictographic communication thing
  
  Currencies can be derived from any sort resource a player might have, whether it's creativity or free time.
  

General Guidelines

In designing, first make a good free basic game and get an audience, then add real-money items carefully.

Most people just nibble media, so the real-money items should be subtle enhancements that harder-core players will want.

Think of item-based games as selling bits of service, bits of UI, a metagame - not just a game design.

Players must be able to trade items with each other. Otherwise, their sense of ownership is not complete.

Players will often sell micro-stories to each other, even if it's not explicitly built into the game.

• In GoPets, players would take different food items and sell combinations of them as a meal, with a blurb of text to explain. They might take lettuce, tomatoes and spinach and call it a garden salad (or whatever). I really like this possibility.

User-made Items

Players set their prices too low when selling to other players! They don't care about money. So set a minimum price.

What do you think? I personally find this design space fascinating. I'm eager to try it out someday. :)

A Blessing for the New Year

Happy New Year! :D One of my New Year's resolutions is to update my blog once a week rather than once a month. I thought I'd start off 2009 with this, originally posted on the MochiAds community forums.

Now 'prayer' and 'soul' are not words that I have ever had much occasion to use. But I think I'm starting to understand what might be meant by someone who uses the word 'prayer', or 'blessing', and where those concepts would fit into a worldview or practice. You see, words are magic. They can be quite powerful in shaping one's expectations, one's mindset, one's perceptual field. And I'm glad to use whatever tool I can get my hands on, if it helps me bring my life more in line with my goals and values.

So, given that, here's a nice bunch of words I've come across recently that felt particularly relevant to me, and how I'd like to be, and now I'd like to offer them to you all, my fellow game developers. :)

A Blessing

May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the
secret love and warmth of your heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and
renewal to those who work with you and to those who
see and receive your work.

May your work never weary you.

May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment,
inspiration, and excitement.

May you be present in what you do.

May you never become lost in the bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your
new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.

May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

~ taken from page 160 of Anam Cara by John O'Donohue

All that stuff is much easier said than done! I guess that's why we keep saying it - to remind ourselves of what we're aiming for. ;)

Here's one thing I've been trying to put into practice - my own words this time:

Don't get overwhelmed or anxious about possibilities or lost opportunities - just make a choice.

As Eskil Steenberg wrote, "In every situation you find yourself, there are limitations, disregarding how much power you accumulate. So being creative is really about finding the possibilities of what you have rather then the limitations of what you don't."

Just do the best you can, right now! You're here, now - make the best of it. :)

Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 5

Here's a new game for you to try out: Storyteller. This clever little experiment allows you to manipulate three characters to influence the outcome of the story they live in. And what's interesting is that people seem to like it! I couldn't find any negative comments about it at all.

This one example may be simple, but it hints at the awesomeness that could be had with more sophisticated interactions and a more immersive presentation.

As I mentioned in a comment on Kongregate:
If people can enjoy a story space consisting of permutations on pairings between three simple characters, imagine what greatness could arise from a more complex and nuanced story.

There was also an interesting discussion of the game on GameSetWatch, focusing on the unusual way it deals with story structure.

"Storyteller works through and because of its clichés. Does it have anything to tell us about interactive storytelling?

If so, what it has to say is probably this:

Explicit structure matters.

Storyteller allows us to change almost everything about the outcome of its storyworld, but it constrains us to three episodes: set-up, crisis, outcome."

More recently, another experimental, pixelated game has been taking the world's Flash portals by storm. This is the delightfully be-tentacled
I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors. It has been popular enough to be the subject of a card challenge on Kongregate and has been featured on the front page of Newgrounds for over a week now. This is quite surprising for a game that has no goal other than to explore all possible branches of the story. And I'm not complaining.

The Majesty of Colors has been described as a vignette game. I'd also describe it as a sort of Environment Sketch, with less on the procedural content and more of a focus on character and story instead of natural beauty. It is also very much a roleplaying game, in the sense that the gameplay consists of playing a role, of acting, and deciding what kind of character you are by the actions that you take. Of course, it is almost minimally simple, like Storyteller, but it hints at the exciting possibilities to be found along this path.

The game also relies heavily on text, as does the earlier experimental hit You Have to Burn the Rope, which I find intriguing. This text is like a sketched placeholder for something that would, in an ordinary game, be conveyed through interactivity. Which is not to say that the writing feels rough - in The Majesty of Colors, this text is very poetic and establishes mood and expectations superbly.

I wonder about the minimalism of these games. Are they that way simply because they are quick experiments, the first of their kind? Could the concepts support a more complex, involved implementation? Is this perhaps an example of intentionally limiting resources to spur creativity? I don't know. I guess I'll just have to try, and see how it turns out.

And now for something completely different.

Or perhaps not so different. This post has been all about the triumph and promise of exploratory, freeform gameplay over the rigidly goal-oriented kind. Now here's an article arguing that play, contrary to popular belief, is not a waste of time: No more game shame. Its premise is actually quite far-reaching:

"We've been steadily increasing our productivity for decades. We work and work and work; when we finally give ourselves permission to play, we party and binge-drink ourselves into oblivion (or sleep in restorative seclusion), maximizing the efficiency of even our recreation. Then we crash and recover just in time to report back to work. Somewhere on a hill Sisyphus is smirking.

We need more creative energy, imaginative thinking, and an infusion of earnest, unselfconscious, child-like faith in impossible dreams. We need more playful fun - not simply downtime or vacation time - that engages our minds and spirits in joyful re-creation. In other words, we could stand to bring back a few lessons from the world we enter when we play with toys."

One reader goes even further in this comment:

"If primitive peoples could get by on four hours a day spent on securing their survival, why, with all of our modern technological advances, do I need to spend twice as long doing the same thing? I perceive WORK to be the waste of time. The eight or so hours a day I spend at work is time I pissed away doing nothing pertinent to what I value or my goals for myself, the world, or my environment."

An interesting perspective on work. And primitive peoples. It brings to mind this delightfully inflammatory article, about the work of Food Not Bombs: or, Free Bread and Soup is a National Threat. As its author says, "The realization that I lived in a culture that locked up it’s food in order to force us to work was a brutal shock." Yes. Interesting.

Why do we work? For money, of course. I came across another article recently. It happened to be curiously relevant to this particular line of thought. I had never really thought about money before, or the dynamics of the system it supports. But now I can see something rather sinister about the whole deal, and where it ends up...

"Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?"

Right? Maybe not. Read on:

"Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money."

That doesn't sound too good to me. The guy who wrote Ishmael has this to say about the difference between traditional economies and those of us civilized people:

"In [tribal] societies, people look after each other for much the same reasons that people in [hierarchical] societies take jobs and have careers. In [tribal] societies, people look after one another not because they're saintly but because looking after one another assures that they themselves will be looked after. If they don't look after one another, then the community disappears -- and no one is looked after.

...

It's an economy. An economy based on support instead of products."

Can we do better?

Well, to bring this back to the world of games, how about I link you to a game development diary detailing the day-by-day progress of a simple Flash game? You like that idea? I wish more people would publish that sort of thing. Maybe I should do one. Hmmm... :)

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Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 4

This post is a celebration of exciting game ideas. Are you feeling excited yet? :D

I've recently revisited the Three Hundred Mechanics project, which is one guy's attempt to document a new, original game design every day for three hundred days. Apparently he's given up on the "every day" part, but among the hundred or so concepts that have been posted so far are quite a few that I really like.

For example...

• Massive Boardgame
• Tiny World Cities
• Stacked Fortress
• The Long Rewind
• Banner Serial
• Escalation
  
• Communist Zombie MUD
• Tiny Crawl World
• Pellet Quest
• Neg-Space Wars
  

And many more...

Just pick one at random and take a look! I find them quite clever, often intriguing, and always delightful to imagine. And as an added bonus, the pixel art that accompanies these descriptions provides another nice treat for the imagination. :)

Speaking of pixel art, here's a guy who takes pixel-y classic games and creates awesome painted character and concept art in the delicious flavor of the originals. Not only that, but he also writes up detailed design documents for his reimagined classics. I don't know if these designs are meant to ever be made into real games, but I hope they are - I'd love to play them!

That picture at the top of this post? That's Bomber Queen.

And be sure to check out Viper Girl as well - the art for that one is really inspiring. I'm amazed that no existing games make use of that chunky, solid-color painting style. It just looks so good!

"I like the simple flat colors of the NES version. With such a limited palette, you almost have to go for a simple light-shadow solution. As hardware evolved and artists got more colors, many fell into the trap of doing gradiation and texture just because they could. It's an easy trap to fall into for a painter as well."

Now, if you thought that was cool, here's something that may be even cooler. Take a look through these continuity guides by art director Bill Perkins. While there's a lot of nice concept art on that site, the first dozen slides are what you really need to see.
Start here.

These images are the continuity guides for a game called Gon, which as far as I can tell never made it out into the real world, sadly. Continuity guides are kind of a step up from concept art. Not experiments in how the game might look, instead they describe how to create art that fits the feel of the game. In this case, that involves an intriguing blend of African art, fractals, plant life, and messing with pictorial space.

Did you know that African art is fractal? I didn't. But apparently a lot of it is, and that's awesome. And what's even more awesome is seeing how these various examples of African art have been drawn upon to deliver a unique and compelling depiction of the savanna. I don't know about you, but I'm inspired. Click.

Oh yes, and before I forget, Mr. Shen wins the internet!
He wins it. Wins. It.

my mind.
blown.

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Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 3

Why are casual games so popular? A very insightful blog post on Anyway Games outlines the true heart of "casual" in three basic principles that any game designer would do well to keep in mind: They offer a "complete experience" immediately, at any time, and consistently.

• Immediately means you don't have to work up to the thrill. The thrill begins when you start the game.
• At any time means the thrill doesn't come in spurts or need rebuilding after the game is paused.
• Consistently means the thrill is there every time the game is turned on.

Read the full article.

*ahem*
Drum roll, please -

And now, for our feature presentation: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides. This insightful presentation by Lost Garden's own Daniel Cook contrasts the way that princess-rescuing might be done as a typical software application, versus how it would be done as a game. As you may guess, Super Mario Bros. does a lot better than Microsoft Word when it comes to the business of saving princesses. What you might not immediately realize is that games can do much better than our usual applications even when it comes to more mundane matters, such as, say, word processing.

The key is in the learning curve, from novice to power user. Typical applications toss a confusing abundance of tools and options at new users, or simplify so much that no one can become an expert. Games on the other hand manage to ensure an enjoyable and reliable ride from utter noobness to l33t mastery. How do they do it? Learn the secrets of game-like application design, including Levels, Items, Inventory, and Quests. More inside! Download the slides.

And here's another Lost Garden article from early in the summer, asking that age-old question, What activities can be turned into games? As it turns out, almost any learnable skill can be turned into a game, if it meets the following criteria:

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
2. Skills can be nested
3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
4. Skills are measurable
5. Performance can be rewarded
6. Skills are locally useful.

Daniel Cook examines these one by one. Read and be amazed! You will never look at a bathroom scale the same way again. Learn how to harness the power of games to "turn a commodity scale into one of the hottest consumer products of the year." All this and more can be yours, for the low, low price of one click.

"As more leisure games emerge that mediate and accelerate the acquisition of skills, there is going to be a economic incentive to spread the science and craft of game design far beyond our tiny game industry. Game design is not just about games. It is a transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters."

Here's an interesting article. Do you ever wonder where people get the time to contribute to Wikipedia, post on their blogs every day or play games online? Well, according to Gin, Television, and Social Surplus they get the time from not watching TV (or, in my case, by not sleeping enough). If you add up all the hours of mental energy that are dissipated into the mind-sink of television, you will get a number close to "Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year." I don't know about you, but I'm happy to carve out a little slice from that cognitive surplus and deploy it towards something a bit more interactive, a bit more eye-opening, a bit more mind-changing, a bit more useful, perhaps. "People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share." Let's help them.

• It seems like 3D in Flash just keeps getting more and more impressive. I can't say much for the content, but this little web experience has graphics and a presentation that I find amazing. Very stylish, very easy to use, and very well done within the limitations of Flash: The Eco Zoo.

For those of you who are willing to dig deep, this Motherload has buried the glittering jewels of addictive game design beneath its rough exterior. You want to know how to make a game addictive, how to ensnare your players in a devilish web of overlapping reward cycles until they have no choice but to do your bidding, even at two in the morning with a paper due the next day? Then perhaps you would do well to begin your study with Motherload. May only the worthy reap its precious secrets.

Oh yeah, in case you were wondering what I did all summer, here's your answer: Elmore City Dance Club. Ever wanted to diagram out an awesome dance step, and share it with all your friends? No? Well now you can, at the Elmore City Dance Club. I did all the Flash parts of the site, including this nifty embeddable widget. Behold!

...haterz want to be me, Soulja Boy, I'm the man, they be lookin' at my neck, sayin'

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

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Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 2

I've just started reading a book called The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. So far, I've quite enjoyed it. Coincidentally, someone has gone through the trouble of typing up exactly the part of the book which I have read - the first chapter. So if you read that part, you'll have about as much reason as I do to be excited about nature games.

(...though you might have to read the Mountains and Waters Sutra too, which could be painful)

So, nature games? What am I talking about?

Well, not too long ago* I read this article online called Let there be life: Games go organic telling how "Developers are nursing creative gameplay out of Mother Nature's mulch" - in other words, getting game ideas from nature.

Besides being introduced to some cool titles like PixelJunk Eden, and the enticing projects going on at Cambrian Games, reading that article has made me wonder whether there might be a real trend here, with new games drawing on nature (or, the real real world) more and more. Because you know, while it's great to keep coming up with new ways to shoot aliens, there's a lot more variety to be found outside, if you look for it. Every species is playing its own game. Even aphids.

Plus it brings us back to our roots, as humans and members of ecological systems. On Lost Garden not too long ago* Daniel Cook wrote up a gameplay analysis of his life-inspired game idea Shade, based on playing a prototype submitted by a reader of his blog. What he found was that "Searching for the perfect mushroom is exciting", and "The dynamically changing world is exciting". He thought the game might be made even more fun by adding more varieties of mushrooms with different growing cycles, and creating "a dynamic ecosystem" by adding predators and seed carriers and more complex mushroom interactions.

This sentence in particular caught my eye: "The fact that the world was living and growing was immensely satisfying." Wow. Well, considering the fact that we, as humans, evolved, were created, to live as active participants of a world that visibly, loudly, lives and grows, what else could you expect? The way so many of us manage to shut out that living, growing world in favor of a world so dead we have to play games to give us that feeling again - well, that's the strange part. This trend, perhaps, of games that come from nature? That's the trend that makes sense.

As I wrote in a comment on that Shade gameplay analysis:
I'm also encouraged by the way these elements of fun that Danc has identified seem to reflect tastes that would be well-suited to people making their living through gathering and hunting food in the wild, as they have throughout the majority of humanity's evolutionary life. It just makes these games seem that much more wholesome. :)

Oh, and if you're wondering, the image above is from the artistically and biologically inspired new game Blueberry Garden. The game is still under development, but the author has released a trailer that looks very promising.

*too long ago

In other news, it seems that there is an intriguing new indie MMO under development, with a rather unusual, if somewhat pretentious, name - Love. I don't know much about the gameplay, but the art style is like a cross between the color script for The Incredibles and a digital speedpainting. I've always thought it would be cool to have a game with that art style. And well, there you go - a game with that art style.

The game's author, Eskil Steenberg, has a blog. It's a very interesting blog, very indie... I like it. I was inspired and encouraged by one post in particular, in which he says that All true renegades walk alone.

"In every situation you find yourself, there are limitations, disregarding how much power you accumulate. So being creative is really about finding the possibilities of what you have rather then the limitations of what you don't."

In fact I found it more directly inspiring even than the now-famous Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Needless to say, I identify quite strongly with the sentiment expressed by Eskil Steenberg throughout his blog.

• While we're on the subject, I think I've fallen in Love with another game idea: Adopt an Invader. It's like Spore would be, if it were designed by Lost Garden, for the graphing calculator. Awesome.

I've also been looking into rapid prototyping again, since I've got so many games I want to make and so little time. I figure that if I can crank out a quick gameplay prototype for each of these ideas, at least half of them will reveal themselves to be horrible ideas that should never be played by anyone, let alone developed into full games. Then I can cross them off my list, without having gone through the trouble of actually finishing them.

But my secret fear is that all my ideas are so amazingly good, I'll have no choice but to make all them. ;)

Anyway, make sure you check out How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days, the definitive how-to article on rapid game prototyping from the four grad students who started the whole trend. Good stuff.

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Exciting and Interesting Cool Things - Part 1

First things first: Braid

This is very encouraging news. Braid is an independent game that has met with very big success. It was developed by a handful of people led by designer Jonathan Blow, and not only is it selling well, it has been getting unanimously positive reviews by both players and critics.

Like Portal, another very popular and well-received game, Braid is an innovative puzzle game built on top of a more familiar action game setting. I wonder if there is something about puzzle games that makes them easier to perfect and polish into a cohesive, finely crafted experience like Braid and Portal.

Braid's author, Jonathan Blow, is a sometimes controversial figure whose writing and talks I have been following for a while. Though I don't necessarily agree with everything he says (or what anyone else says, really) it's always fun and interesting to listen. And the success of his first big project, Braid, shows that he knows what he's doing, and that it's possible to make it big as an indie developer. I find that very encouraging.

At the end of one talk he gave earlier this year called Games Need You, about "how our games are inherently conflicted", Blow read a quote describing how games convey meaning:

"...meaning which is less specific, less concrete and deliberate, harder to define, harder to pin down, a meaning that transcends the author-reader conduit model of 'message' style meaning, a meaning that absorbs intention but is not bound by it, a meaning that can't be reduced to a claim about the world, but is no less about the world because of it."

It struck me that this describes not only how games might convey meaning, but could just as well be a description of mythtelling through oral narrative poetry, as described in the book A Story as Sharp as a Knife. If you want to understand the meaning of games, you would do well to read that book.

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