After the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy finally came out I set aside a little time to read the whole series. I happily devoured all three books in as many nights. The Hunger Games is the story of a teenage girl who makes a kind of extraordinary sacrifice, helping (sometimes inadvertently) to change the world. Suzanne Collins presents us with a world full of ambiguity and brutality, and characters forced to choose between something bad or something even worse. It is a compelling and honest work of fiction that resonates with me.

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After hearing Nathan Vella's talk at Indiecade this year, I reorganized my personal website into three distinct categories: creator projects, collaborator projects, and contributor projects. Contributor projects are projects that don't really reflect my vision, or whatever you would call it. My input was limited to simply helping it exist somehow. The team or project was missing a piece, and I could fill that role, or complete that section, and help realize someone else's vision.

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I posted one of these last year, though in a slightly more timely fashion. Before I completely forget about these films I wanted to repost them here, as they should be either getting limited US releases or becoming available on netflix (or getting easier to bt!) sometime soon.

My #1 film of the festival this year was  A Boy and His Samurai, from the team that brought us the marvelous fugitive film Golden Slumber last year:

I particularly loved the main conflict in this film had to do with trying to figure out what a modern family is, and how that works, logistically and psychologically. I feel like films ignore this but that it is just a huge part of life in the modern world. Wonderful!

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UPDATE: Gamenauts responds in less than ten minutes. Holy smokes, "extreme hypocrisy" indeed.

Last night, a representative of Gamenauts sent me this message on Twitter, completely out of the blue:

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Earlier this month I got to spend a few days in LA, speaking at IndieCade and having some really inspirational conversations with friends I don't get to see much.  It was humbling and overwhelming in a lot of ways.  I wanted to share some of the ideas I picked up from the trip with you, and record them for posterity before I cleared off that part of my whiteboard.

I should stress that I did not think these things up myself, nor am I certain that these are somehow universal truths.  These are things that came up in the course of conversation with some people for whom I have an immense amount of respect, and the ideas struck me as thought-provoking or inspirational in one way or another.  I hope you'll read these in the same spirit of thoughtful consideration, and whether you ultimately agree with them or not I hope you find them interesting or useful.

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At IndieCade last week, Jon Blow (Braid, The Witness) used the term "contrivance" to describe all the bullshit we put between players and the game; between players and the puzzle; between players and the system; between players and the experience.  Whether the contrivance is intentional or not is not as important as its mere existence, the fact that it is a significant obstacle, whether the part of the game that is the most interesting is exposed as much as possible to the player.

Last night I got caught up on some recent and not-so-recent iOS games that I'd been meaning to check.  These games were all official Apple "Game of the Week" or otherwise pretty hefty critical and commercial successes: Forever Drive, Infinity Blade, and Jetpack Joyride.

I also checked out two smaller titles: Async Corp and Super Crossfire HD.  Super Crossfire is a really solid and simple arcade game (ported from the highly respected XBLIG title of the same name) that takes some of the arena shooter innovations from the last few years and puts them into a Space Invaders game with a cool "warping" mechanic.  Async Corp (pointed out to me by Simon Flesser of Ilo Milo and Bumpy Road) is a strange and wonderful little puzzle game that I am still rolling around in my head, and may write more about later.  Actually, Bumpy Road is rather important to the points I am about to make...

I want to make three distinct points, which I will elaborate on below.  The first is that developers need to be more cognizant and responsible about something I'm calling the Checklist Effect.  The second is that In-App Purchases violate the sacred circle of play in a profound way.  Games that do both of these things, that abuse checklists and include In-App Purchases, are deliberately contriving their designs in the worst way in order to extort money from players, which is unethical and unacceptable design practice.  Finally, games that intrude on my phone's home screen with advertisements for other products, using the iOS notification badges especially, though less contrived, are contrived for the same greedy reason.

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Hey there my most excellent friends and companions!  I gave an experimental unrehearsed talk at IndieCade this weekend about "pursuing the infinite", featuring an original 60-minute animation of a space launch, accompanied by the ambient tunes of The Inventors of Aircraft, Biosphere, Boards of Canada, and C418.

I just uploaded a looping version of the animation, sans jams, which you can download here.  This .zip file contains Windows and Mac versions.  Perfect for parties and confusing, depressing presentations to your peers.  Best served with medium-dry space disco, or more full-bodied minimalist tech opera.

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Lately it seems like there is a lot of confusion over the term "game design" and what it means.  I wanted to quickly (headed out the door at the mo, so very quickly!!) explain why I don't include brainstorming or marketing under the game design umbrella.  I may update this in the future based on feedback and further reflection, but in the meantime...

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is the process of coming up with an elaborating on ideas for projects on paper, in digital word documents, or in digital graphics files.  This is the part of a project where we are writing down ideas about rules or doing concept art for what the game might look like.  Brainstorming is not game design.  Brainstorming is fun, but it is wholly speculative and the results are ultimately worthless.  Brainstorming is not game design.

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