I have a new obsession. I intend to be the first person in the world to exhaustively catalogue all the games in the world you can play while doing what you’re doing in the game. Here’s my complete list so far:

- Eating chocolate while playing Chocolate Castle*.

I had a genuine moment of meta-existentialism as I glanced away from the game to rearrange my chunks (a 3-brick and a 2-brick of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, if you must know. I’m not proud), and then scarfed them, leaving only crumbs. The world, sadly, did not then erupt in a glorious shower of 16-bit chip-tune victory music, but I still felt like I’d poked my very own tear in the fabric of reality.

That’s pretty much it, so far. If I was a bit more adventurous I might try to emulate Randall Munroe and take up double-frontside-360ing, but I’m probably marginally worse at Tony Hawk’s than I would be at skate-boarding and might well break my nose on my DS. Does hunching over a laptop in a darkened room at 3 in the morning to play Uplink count? Or would I have to wait till 2010 for that to make the list? Are there train drivers who sneak one-handed goes on Densha-de-Go to while away long straights?

As you can seem this isn’t going to be easy, so I need your help. Both in suggestions for additions to the list, and for a name for the whole damn idea. It’s like how we need a word for words when the word itself is an example of the thing that it means - like how ‘portmanteau‘ is a portmanteau word in its own right. And, while you’re at it, I’d be equally happy to receive additions to my long-floundering list of homographic homophonic autanonyms - T-rex explains just what those are better than I ever could here. So far I’ve got cleave, dust, fast, several, overlook, sanction and quite. And yes, I know how many of those are highly debatable.

Basically, what I really need is someone to write me a Pokemon clone, where the Pokemon are actually the complete contents of the OED, and I could hunt for the word for playing a game while doing the same thing in real life while playing a game about hunting for words, and then I could add that game to the list, right under playing Chocolate Castle, and then world would explode and we’d never have to talk about it again.

* Thanks to Simon Carless’ reminder. It is an utter delight - not quite as powerfully happy-making as Peggle, but close.

I admit it: I like sums. My desk is covered in bits of paper covered in scrawled estimates of tick rates, mana effiencies and crit stats. Actual maths has always daunted me, but sums? Sums are comfort food for your brain. Soothing, repetitive, reassuring - it’s really just a different kind of doodling, except when someone walks in on you, they apologise anxiously and walk away impressed with your industry. My doodles have never impressed anyone.

So what could be better than sums? Sums in games, of course. You may have spent your summer enslaved to Plupon, or already be wrestling with Add ‘Em Up, in which case you don’t need me to tell you how hypnotic adding up can be. But if you’re yet to fall under their sway, or are looking for a new numerological overlord, then may I point you to Chain Factor? What at first sight is yet another block-dropper is actually a rather subtle puzzler, asking you to match the digits on each disc with the number of discs in each row or column. All your usual strategies are completely irrelevant here, so switch off your Tetris/Puzzle Fighter/Baku Baku instincts and prepare to feel the blood flowing to entirely new bits of your brain. The only tactic I’ve definitely sussed so far is to use the ‘1′ discs to hammer away at exposed grays at the tops of towers. For some reason this reminds me very strongly of smashing eggs on the tops of bald people’s heads.

It’s rare to find a free Flash game this good, this fresh, and this polished - please do have the sound on when you play. And that seems to be due in no small part to the vehement passion of its developers, as revealed in the game’s FAQ:

The games industry is poised on the brink of a profound transformation. Games have the potential to be the most powerful artform ever invented, an unparalleled medium for the exploration of dynamic interactive systems and the expression of complex emotional, social, and political ideas.

But the creative power of games is being held hostage by the conservative forces of the marketplace. For years, the mainstream games industry has fed us a steady stream of lowest-common-denominator drivel: brightly colored mascots scampering around childish fantasy lands; hyper-violent, testosterone-soaked war simulators; vacuous, marketing-driven movie spin-offs; and the endless grind of mindless, massively-multiplayer treadmills.

Chain Factor offers an alternative: an independent game designed outside the traditional channels of development and distribution and driven by a singular vision: put the power back into the hands of the players and let them create the game they want to play.

Stirring stuff. But, turns out after some proxy Googling (thanks, B!) that this post should really be called Playing by the Numb3rs, because Chain Factor is actually part of an ARG spawned from CBS’s maths-detectives show of the same name. A recent episode, Primacy, centered on a fictional ARG, and a range of tip-offs and related adverts have followed in its wake. Play long enough, and anomalous things start happening. I won’t spoil it, just in case you want to follow the experience for yourself, but there seems to be a wiki growing up here, if you enjoy the meta-game of watching everyone else play more than playing yourself.

It’s almost a disappointment to discover that it’s corporate-fueled, rather than the work of plucky indies, but then you realise that the developer’s call to arms, rather than being empty invective (or deliberately tongue-in-ARG play-acting), it’s probably a very fair point. Under normal circumstances, Chain Factor would be an unusually good, unusually polished Flash freebie, struggling to get noticed and barely making money. As it is, it’s unusually good, unusually polished, finding a wide audience and paid cash-on-the-barrelhead by CBS. It may not be quite the process you imagined when you read ‘an independent game designed outside the traditional channels of development and distribution and driven by a singular vision’, but you have to admit it qualifies on all fronts. I look forward to some interesting developer interviews once all the alternate reality cats are out of the game bag.

Come with me down memory lane. Remember Soda Play’s Constructor? That nifty springs-and-sprockets creature-machine builder from a few years ago, that made you 100 times more excited than Meccano (I did warn you about memory lane), but ultimately crushed you with the revelation of your own ineptitude, impatience and lack of creativity? Well, Soda Play are back, only now instead of creature-machines, you can make games.

Newtoon is a Java tool which lets you make little 2D physics-based games entirely out of balls and springs. You can fix balls to the play-field or leave them to bounce free, and springs can be adjusted for tension. This being Soda Play, you can tweak things like gravity and friction. So far, so familiar, right? But the game bit comes in through some devilishly simple grammar. Each ball can, if you so chose, be designated a goal, hazard, or player token. The token can be controlled by the arrow keys: touch a hazard and it’s game over, touch the goal and it’s a win. And suddenly, all of 90 seconds later, you’ve made your first game.

I’ve done my time with idiot-proof game creators - with RPG Maker, and Dark Basic and various modding tools, but am usually defeated by the same failings that Meccano used to reveal. With Newtoon, it will take an actual act of an actual god to prevent you from making a game. It’s the Wario Ware of game-makers, something you really can play with for 2 minutes and find rewarding.

And, actually, it really is the Wario Ware of game-makers, as you can collect your own and other creators’ mini-games into ’stacks’ which will remind you very much of that very game. Much in the manner of Constructor all your games can be saved to Soda Play’s website. I also seem to remember something in the beta about being able to download game stacks to play on your mobile phone, but no sign of that at present.

Basically, if you’ve got an hour to kill between now and lunch, you can use Newtoon to become an experienced game-maker. Just think how much more authority your forum posts will have when you can preface them with ‘In the games that I’ve made…’! Or, if you’re already an experienced game-maker, just think how gratifying it will be watching your friends, family and foes discover that it isn’t as easy as it looks, even when it looks this easy.

And, if that’s given you the taste for drawing things in 2D and watching physics happen to them, then I’d recommend spending the afternoon playing Crayon Physics. And then writing mass petitions to Nintendo to get it a DS deal.