This sometimes happens: I woke up mad at something I read a week ago. Today, it was Chris Bateman’s measured, interesting, informed article positing that a game has never - could never - make you cry. It’s not at all his fault. The distinction he makes between games as play, and games as systems is an interesting one, and his observation that games make people cry not through systems and rulesets and interactions themselves, but through the stories which are embedded within them, is sound.

What makes me angry - even in my sleep, it would seem -  is that we seem as incapable from moving on from the ‘can-we-make-people-cry’ debate as we are from the ‘are-games-art’ debate. I ranted about both before, in magazines and conference halls and pubs and railway sidings and on the internet, so I’ll try and keep it brief, but come on. Really? Can’t we leave it behind? The last group of people I encountered so dead set on making people cry were the boys in my class in primary two who had a dead frog in a matchbox they showed to all the girls. Can’t we aim a bit higher? Making people cry is not synonymous with high art, and it’s not synonymous with a deep and valuable emotional response.

I’ve been waiting all year to go to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate, and I’m not expecting it to make me cry. I am expecting to be ambushed by memories of things I thought or hoped forgotten. I am expecting to find solace and some strange kind of sustenance in the colours and contrasts that he painted. I am expecting the rhythms and patterns that I see to change how I think about the rhythms and patterns of my own life, and of my own thoughts. I am expecting to leave with a sense of wonder, melancholy and gratitude towards this man I never met, who died before I was born, who yet took the time to leave these treasures behind for me. In short, I’m expecting it to be moving, enriching, challenging. I’m expecting to be not quite the same person when I come out that I was when I went in. All with out story, all without tears.

Tears shouldn’t be our goal. Stories don’t need to be our tools. The majority of art forms don’t rely on narrative for their emotional impact. Stop and think about that for a second. The games industry tends to draw on such an amazingly limited roster of inspirations that it’s easy to forget it. But our obsession with linear, story-based - word-based, even - non-participatory art at the expense of all the other forms makes life so much harder for games, and it makes me crazy. I swear, next GDC I’m going to set myself up behind a table in the lobby with a huge pile of rubber bands and a huge pile of Jelly Tots, and each delegate, as they come in, is going to get a band on their left wrist and a handful of sweets in their right pocket. And then, all week, every time they hear the word ‘film’, ‘book’ or ‘TV show’, they have to give themselves a snap. And everytime they hear the world ‘painting’, ‘theatre’, ’sculpture’, ‘opera’, ‘architecture’, ‘comics’*, ‘dance’, ‘music’ or ‘poetry’, they get a sweetie. Two, if they say it rather than hear it. But goddamit, we’re not the only people trying to create emotionally resonant experiences in environments that aren’t kind to linear narratives. Landscape gardeners talk with great sensitivity and great ambition about how they want visitors to their gardens to feel. Typographers can - and do, and have, and will again - talk for hours about the emotional resonance of difference fonts, of how different approaches to typesetting can totally change the mood and tone of a piece before you’ve even read a word. The world knows a lot about how to do this stuff, and all that knowledge is just there, lying about in galleries and on radios and along boulevards, for us to plunder.

So please, stop trying to make me cry, before you drive me to tears. But do keep trying to make me feel.

* I know comics are narrative-led, but I like them too much to not give people sweeties when they talk about them. And they’re still more useful to games than films, books, or TV.

 My inevitable decline continues apace on Offworld.

Look away now, those who are made easily envious of animated favicons: my new column has launched on Boing Boing’s new game site, Offworld. It’s called One More Go, and it’s about the games I can’t stop going back to, and why I can’t stop going back to them. To my enormous surprise, this one turned out to be about New York Times Crosswords, although it really shouldn’t have been a surprise, because it’s been a constant companion pretty much every since it came out.

More surprisingly, I didn’t write any of the things I mean to write about it. I got, it’s fair to say, a bit distracted. What I was really planning to bang on about was some very different stuff, namely:

Crosswords are the perfect expression of how games are about the relationship between game-maker and game-player! We don’t talk about this nearly enough in mainstream videogames, but one of the reasons I’ve always loved them is the feeling that I’m playing an experience which has been crafted for me by someone I’ve never met. It’s like the best Valentine’s Day present ever: something that someone has spent years of their life on, designed to do nothing more than make you happy. And the odd bodged clue in NYTC highlights that very effectively - it makes you acutely conscious of the human being at the other end of this experience. It’s why I’ve always been more interested in single-player games than multi-player games; I’ve always been more interested in beating the master of the game than another of its participants. And this seems to be a culture crosswords share. People who regularly play cryptic crosswords have a strong sense of connection with the people who set them - people who they’ve never met, but who have, over decades in some cases, entertained, challenged and educated them. If you think I’m over-stating the case, then keep your eyes peeled for the return of BBC4’s How To Solve A Cryptic Crossword, which has infuriatingly just dropped off iPlayer, but which does a lovely job of summing up how intense the relationship can be between players and makers. Or doers and setters, or whatever the right crossword terminology would be.

Crosswords were initially vilified in almost exactly the same way games are! Namely, for being a waste of time and a passing fad. Wikipedia has most of the best quotes, so I won’t regurgitate them all here, but purely in the services of irony, here’s The New York Times itself railing against them in 1924 (they’re younger than you think, crosswords). Sound familiar?:

 ”[the] sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport… [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.”

Crosswords embed really complex cultural variations within one very simple ruleset! One of the reasons I’ve stuck with NYTC for so long is that, as a UK crossworder, it’s so alien to me. The simple differential between UK and US crossword grids - US ones have fewer black square, so almost every letter of every word has to be in another word - means that US crosswords have to use much more unconventional words and slang phrases. UK crosswords are extremely orthodox by comparison. But then UK cryptic crosswords seem to be far more complex and traditional than their popular US counterparts (although I think some of the more esoteric US cryptics give them more than a run for their money). So, even before you get to the actual cultural context of the clues (and, let me tell you, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to realise that a ‘Thanksgiving sidedish - 3 letters’ might be ‘yam’), there’s cultural data embedded in the ruleset. I love that you can tell a UK crossword from a US one just by looking at it. I wish we could still do that with videogames.

Final note: I’m not kidding about being stuck on that clue. Any takers?

 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank)

So, part of having The Best Job In The World, is getting to help run The Best Games Festival In The World, which is part of my cunning overall plan to get paid for doing things I would pay to do anyway. Here’s a brief guide to what you (you!) could be doing in less than a fortnight. I really can’t think of any sane reason why anyone who likes games wouldn’t want to come along.

Thursday 30th October
Sessions from SCEE’s EyeToy team and Midway Newcastle, a live Q&A with God Of War’s David Jaffe, art workshops with Bizarre Creations, design workshops with Midway Newcastle, and a chance to pick the brains of some of the best independent game developers from around Europe. Plus game design insights from Elite-creator David Braben, the inside track from mod-makers turned Quake Wars designers Splash Damage and the world premier of the new game from Amanita Design, makers of the universally acclaimed Samarost.

Friday 31st October
A unique masterclass in game design as original designers Martin Hollis and David Doak dissect Goldeneye, and an insight into the workings of Guitar Hero and Rock Band creators Harmonix, plus the chance to put your questions direct to Geometry War’s Stephen Cakebread and Oddword’s Lorne Lanning. TT Games will be on hand to advise on how to achieve real-world domination, and Monumental Games will do the same for virtual-world domination .

Saturday 1st November
Saturday takes us back to the birth of a phenomenon as we hear firsthand about the creation of the first Grand Theft Auto, before Media Molecule, creators of the extraordinary Little Big Planet take to the stage to deliver this year’s BAFTA keynote. Then we head back the the US (via Skype) to hear direct from another big star in the gaming firmament and discover how things will change when gamers rule the world.

But that’s not all!

It really isn’t. Keep your eyes peeled for some last-minute, big-name additions to the programme, which will present fantastic opportunities to hear first-hand from some of the biggest companies making games in the UK today. And, alongside all these fantastic sessions, we also have huge extravaganzas like our Halloween attempt on the world zombie gathering record, which will give you a chance to shamble your way into the record books, live gigs from Harmonix, Jonathan Coulton, Press Play On Tape and PowerPlay, pub quizzes, craft sessions, birthday parties, all-night gaming marathons and more. And that’s not to mention the chance to quaff our very own festival beer (Fine Ale Fantasy), and take advantage of fantastic offers across a wide range of Nottingham’s bars and restaurants.

…are what you need.

Just a quick pointer for anyone who’s ever fancied being a world record holder: Guinness are accepting nominations for new gaming records from people who think they can achieve them live on the big screen at this year’s GameCity. So, if you know you have some obscure, unbeaten claim to gaming fame (I’ll give anyone a run for their money of fastest lap of Altima with the TV turned off) this is your chance to claim international glory. Head over to sign up here.

Having actually edited a magazine I should be past the point of being over-excited about getting on a cover, but check it out! I’m - or rather, my feature on Spore - is (sort of) on the cover of Seed, which is a magazine about real things, rather than chunks of light that jump when you press A. I spent an absolutely bedazzling week earlier this year interviewing the leads on Spore (as well as some otherwise brilliant people like Frank Lantz), closely followed by an utterly excruciating week trying to edit down 15,000 words of transcripts to a 2,500 word article. Hopefully they’re all kind enough to forgive me for relegating 95% of the clever things they said to my drafts folder. You don’t get a lot of fluff when you’re talking to people that smart, let me tell you. The piece was intended to focus very much on Spore’s scientific credentials, so hopefully it covers some rather different ground from what you may have read before.

And if, on reading it, you’re having interesting thoughts about using games a crowd-sourcing tools for forming models for complex, behaviour-driven systems,  you might want to check out Jane McGonigal’s new project Superstruct, a step beyond World Without Oil which endevours to use our imaginations to understand what the impending Apocolypse might actually look like.

Last night marked the end of my inaugural ARG, which I launched to a wave of muted perplexity during my talk at this year’s Develop. As you can see, the turn-out rather took me by surprise. In fact, it took me so much by surprise that I ended up at the back of the queue, couldn’t get in, and was an hour late for my own event.

Now, that would have been a disaster - well, actually, was a disaster - if that queue of people had all been there because of me. Obviously, they weren’t. They were there for one of London’s brilliant little secrets: the candle-lit tour of the extraordinary Sir John Soane’s Museum. The cunning plan for the end of my ARG was to send anyone who’d bothered to play to somewhere brilliant, so they were guaranteed a good time regardless of what else I managed to cook up, which in the end didn’t turn out to be anything much. This is what comes of designing live-event based games from scratch in 15 minutes at the middle of the night before a presentation. I also wasn’t really expecting anyone to play, or indeed anyone to actually show up, so the real surprise was that one of the people in that queue was a bonafide player, who won a bonafide bottle of champagne for his efforts and we had a jolly nice chat while we waited for an hour to actually get in. I did try to expedite our way up the queue by explaining to the commissionaire what was happening, but without success (’I ran a competition to try encourage people to come to your museum.’ I said, winningly. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It just makes it harder for all the real people.’ he said, disgustedly. Ouch.). That said, I’ve got no way of knowing if anyone else was there, having turned up two hours early and actually made it to the meeting point in time, and left in bitter disappointment when I was a no-show. If anyone did - my most sincere apologies. Let me know, and I’ll concoct some sort of Brilliant Prize of Intense Contrition.

 The slides for the talk are still here (giant pdf, sorry), if you fancy a bash at the unbelievably crude and heavy handed clue-trail. I’ll post a proper transcript shortly, to save you digging it all out of the slides. Thanks to everyone who did play, and who’s given  me feedback. It’s been brilliant experience, and I’ll be writing it up for the IGDA ARG SIG (proposed title: 15 Minutes Of Lame - What I learned from making every classic ARG mistake all at once).

In the session I did at Edinburgh I talked a bit about how new distribution channels and financial models were changing the kinds of IP it might be interesting - and potentially profitable - for games to explore. I was thinking of things like On The Rain-Slicked Precipice Of Darkness and Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, but I’ve just realised I overlooked the dream ticket. I’m not necessarily a big fan of games based on existing IP (we have an infinite blank sheet of intelligent paper! Can’t we use our own ideas?), but now I see how naive I was. 2009’s unmissable licence is going to be Rescue Ink.

There’s an About page here, and some adorable New York Times photos here, but the basic gist is: Hell’s Angels who rescue kittens.  Which, in a nutshell, is surely the perfect licence. You’ve got total cross-demographic appeal. Cute puppies! Badass tatts! Breaking up dog fights! Weaning kittens! Even politicians would have no option but to applaud it. You’ve got an amazingly well differentiated roster of characters with really clear gameplay implications: mechanic, high-rise construction worker, car specialist, ex-cop, ex-spec-ops, martial arts expert, fire-fighter, all with distinct images and brilliant nick-names. You’ve got a great mix of potential gameplay styles - from a GTA-style cruising to find emergent animal abuse, to squad-based strat stuff (do you send both George and Fat Ant on the same bust, or is that overkill? What if you need someone who can pick a lock? Or specialises in Rottweilers?), to Tamagotchi kitten-rearing stuff (one syringe of milk on the hour, every hour). Basically, I can’t see a platform, genre or market this wouldn’t flourish in. All we need to figure out now is who should get to make it. I’m thinking maybe the Yakuza team, since they’ve got a proven ability to handle the brutish, the cute and the silly.

In the meantime, while you wait for work to start on the 2009 all-format Christmas number one (’Special thanks - Margaret Robertson’), you can donate here or volunteer here.

Laziness coefficient: high.

If I were a better person, I’d have wonders to show you thanks to the hours I’ve spent doodling in my Top Three Best Current Physics Toy Things, but I’m not, so I don’t. Instead, here they are for you to play with, so you can see if you can empty your laptop battery quicker than it takes to get you to get fired for never doing any work again ever:

OE Cake: impossibly flexible physics creation tool. Watch the videos on the site and do some YouTube trawling to get some sense of just how powerful it is, and how many crazy machines and explosions and cakes you can make with it. The moment your brain finally dissolves into an adoring whimper is the moment you realise you can drop-and-drag images files in and turn them into lumps of burning rubbery fuel. Handy cheat-sheet in the notes here.

Powder Game: the latest version of Hell Of Sand,  which makes you wonder why the world bothers having anything in it that isn’t fireworks, bubbles, C4, gunpowder or superballs.

Fantastic Contraption: so fantastic, it seems to have fallen over for now, but presumably it’ll be back. My brain has filed it as a cross between Braid and Crayon Physics, which is highly misleading, but will make you curious enough to play it so I’m sticking with it.

Edinburgh ‘08 report:

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I regret: 2

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I don’t regret: 19

Number of things I said that would have made the internet really angry if it had been in the room at the time but it wasn’t so phew: 487,943

Number of people I promised I really would get a ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’ T-shirt made: 3

Gosh,  Edinburgh’s lovely. I really ought to know that by now, for all sorts of reasons, but it still takes me by surprise every time. But it was great to get a chance to load up on plain bread, and see a bunch of old friends, and catch up with all the Dare students as they all get one step closer to taking over the world.

The rather ramshackle slides for my rather ramshackle talk are here (sorry, 13 meg pdf or so, somehow). Fair disclosure: the notes represent what I had been planning to say if I’d had rather more sleep rather than what I actually managed to blurt out on the day, so apologies if they don’t mesh very well with what you heard. A lot of people have been asking me for the Patrick Redding talk, which you can get here, and really, if you’re only going to read one of them, read his and not mine, because his is properly brilliant.  Thanks again to EIF and Dare for inviting me up: good games, good people, good beer, bad weather. God, I miss Scotland.