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.

The full story of last night’s descent into debauchery is told by this series of pics, but the sad and brutal truth is that what started as a black-tie, five-course dinner party took less than two hours to turn into a drunken, high-altitude skinny-dip, and less than fifteen minutes after that to turn into a mounted cosplay rampage in which we skinned baby dinosaurs for sport and punched each other in the face for happy eternities.  I don’t intend to leave the house with less than three ninjas ever again. Endless thanks are due to Munch for the eats and Crys for the dress and everyone else for the larks.

* Is it cosplay if you dress up in game as game character from the same game? How can it not be?

Edit: Oh, god, I forgot about the naked conga.

A while ago I posted a rather uncharitable thing about board games, in which I confessed to the world that I hated them, and ever since then the world has been queuing up to tell me why I’m wrong. I’ve missed a fair few playdates since, but today I finally had the first lesson in my much-needed re-education, courtesy of Lost Cities. There could hardly have been a better candidate for helping change my mind, since it takes less than 3 hours (a lot less) to play, doesn’t involve batteries or any cheap bits of plastic, isn’t stupidly dice dependent, and takes all of 20 seconds to set up. So today turned out not just to be the first time I played a board game and liked it, it turned out to be the first time I played a board game three times in a row and liked it. I could explain to you how it plays, but it would be entirely redundant - partly because it’s dementedly simple, but mostly because you can just go and download it on Xbox Live and find out for yourselves.

There’s an irony there, of course - that my new favourite board game is actually also a videogame - but I’m going to ignore that for now, just as I’m going to ignore my nagging worry that Lost Cities is really a card game not a board game, so I haven’t broken my jinx at all. Instead, I’m going to revel in the discovery that board games have brilliant stories. Who knew? Lost Cities tells its across the glorious time-lapse pictures that decorate its cards, but my new Favourite Game Story Ever (taking over from New Zealand Story’s ‘Drat! A walrus has stolen my friends!’) is that of Lost Cities stable-mate, Igloo Pop:

The young ice giant has a big problem: he wants to buy fishsticks, but he cannot remember how many and he has nine shopping lists in his basket. So he goes from igloo to igloo and shakes each. In each he listens to the delicious fishsticks bouncing off the igloo walls. When he thinks that the igloo in his hand has the same number of fishsticks as one of his shopping lists, he takes it home. When he gets home, there are no fishsticks in the igloo. Instead, wild and laughing Eskimo children tumble out of the igloo. Excitedly they shout, “Shake us again!” “That was great fun!” “This is super”, thinks the young ice giant. “Now, I have found some new friends to play with!” And, he promptly forgets all about his shopping lists.

What could beat that? Well, I’m hoping 1960: The Making of a President will, since it’s the game I’ve been most frequently recommended since I ‘fessed up to my board game humbug last year. But 1960 won’t be my next piece of gaming re-education. Tomorrow I’m heading down to the South Bank to see if the Hide and Seek festival can cure me of the cripplingly British self-consciousness which tends to ruin pervasive games for me. Jane McGonigal will be running a session of Cruel 2 B Kind, and bunch of other games will give you - if you come along, and why wouldn’t you? - a chance to be a freemason, a beachcomber or a bee. Kazoos, I’m assured, will be provided.

[Photo credit: Library Gamer]

NLGD conference report:

Swag haul: sweet fisheye camera, sisal friction mitt, two new T-shirt ideas, another Euro plug adapter, Smints, biros.

New big ideas: control and freedom are opposites; puzzle and strategy games are the same genre; creativity is best enhanced by limiting tools not increasing raw materials; games are disproportionate feedback loops.

New English words: aboutness, enculturated, Spornography.

New Dutch words: bluff (bluff), zwanger (pregnant), burgervader (mayor), success (good luck), slagroom (whipped cream).

Life-changing top tip: the thing that plugs into a MacBook adapter is secretly just a vanilla figure-of-eight cable, so if you’re feeling brave you can leave cable *and* country-plug-adapter at home, and just cannibalise something in your hotel room.

Unforgettable moment face off: discovering I’m exactly the same height as Ralph Baer vs popping my Rock Band cherry on a gold dump truck in the town square.

I’ll post slides and transcripts and stuff shortly, but for now, here are the games from my talk on Wednesday (links for playable stuff, fun for offline stuff):

God Hand (silly)

September 12th (solemn)

Braid (small team)

GTA IV (large team)

Cat On A Dolphin (rudimentary)

Bioshock (lavish)

Gravitation (emotional)

Dual N-back (abstract)

Perfect Cherry Blossom (reacting)

Advance Wars (planning)

Metal Gear Solid 4 (creator led)

Spore (user led)

And here are the del.icio.us tags I’m using to keep track of all the games, books and sites people recommended to me while I was there:

NLGD2008readinglist

NLGD2008playlist

NLGD2008linklist

Thanks to the NLGD team for running such a slick event and looking after us all so well. And thanks to all the exceptionally nice people who I got to drink and talk and think with.

Thanks to all of you who pointed out the colossal maths goof in my BBC column yesterday. I’d love to blame it on some kind of hangover confusion from the great British vs US billion debacle, but I’d still be out by a factor of 100. Or maybe 1000? Loads, basically. Lots and lots. Like tons. Tonnes? Aw, man.

But yes, at any rate, we only squander hundred or so wikipedias a year, not a thousand. At least, I really hope it’s a hundred. Well, inasmuch as it’s 90. Rats. Can we all just agree on loads?

I’ve just finished reading Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, a very good book I can’t in clear conscience recommend to you, because it is, without doubt, the least dramatic novel I’ve ever read. In the course of its 500+ pages fundamentally nothing happens. Our hero goes to school, which he likes; he goes to university, which he likes; he goes to a monastery, which he likes; he goes to another monastery, which is also likes; he gets a job, which he likes; and he makes a decision, which he has no cause to regret. In between, he has interminably genteel, articulate conversations with other genteel, articulate people, whom he likes and who like him. Somehow, along the way, it manages to be an extraordinary and unflinching exploration of the nature of love, authority, regret, responsibility, religion, knowledge, aging, nature, civilisation, war, individuality, fatherhood, history, friendship, childhood, society, music, philosophy and integrity, which is probably why it won Hesse the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, what the hell, I’m going to recommend it to you anyway.

And that’s partly because, as the title reveals, it’s all about a game. Who knew there was a Nobel-winning cornerstone of heavyweight Germanic literature all about games? Nor is it just about a game, it’s about a time in the near future when gaming has become the highest expression of scholarship, creativity and intellectual refinement. From our perspective, as games take their first fledgling steps towards being seen as a credible creative outlet, it’s an extraordinarily remote concept. All the more extraordinary then for Hesse, writing in 1943 about the 25th century, to see a time when playing could be viewed as the finest of our arts. Not least since, in the nine years it took him to complete the book, the upheavals underway in Germany and the world must have been continually reshaping his perceptions of how bleak our future might be.

Quite what the Glass Bead Game is is never fully explained in the book. It’s described by the narrator as being based on ‘a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts…and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.’ Lofty stuff, but its genesis sounds spookily close to something we already have, something that was invented by a game-maker. The Game’s roots were in a music student pastime of calling out shorthands for motifs of classic compositions, which other students would have to answer with continuations or improvisations. Eventually, to facilitate this, someone constructed ‘a frame, modelled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes and colours. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes.’ Sound familiar? It should if you’ve encountered the Tenori-On, the totally abstract electronic instrument based around a grid of light-beads, invented by the designer of Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai.

We are, of course, a long way off a time when devising or playing games could (or indeed should) be seen as intellectually challenging, creatively stimulating and spritually satisfying as the Glass Bead Game is portrayed as being. And, indeed, the heart of Hesse’s book is a debate about whether or not something so esoteric and abstracted can ever make a meaningful contribution to human life. But it’s interesting to imagine where we might end up if we’ve already taken the first steps towards Hesse’s future, not least thanks to the Tenori-On. A few brave souls have even tried to create working prototypes of the Glass Bead Game - the most playable of which is here - albeit in a form which is a long way from the calligraphy-and-meditation based displays which are described as forming the height of the game’s evolution. And if you’re still not convinced that Hesse might have been ahead of his time on foreseeing the future of gaming culture, consider this: what are the players of his Glass Bead Game known as? ‘Lusers’. For real, just like that, thanks to a corruption of the Latin. How’s that for futurecasting?

I’m a juror for Indiecade, a roving festival which celebrates, promotes and rewards independent games and their designers, which means I’ve been horribly remiss in not publicising the call for submissions for their 2008 tour. If you’re a game-maker who isn’t funded by a major, ESA-member publisher you have until April 11th to check out Indiecade’s exceptionally hospitable eligibility criteria and get your game submitted. And if you’re not a game-maker, but you’ve spotted something of late which you think deserves to be paraded round the world and showered in glitter, then lose no time in firing off an email to its creators encouraging them to get involved. I’ll be doing just that to Kian, who made the epically satisfying You Have To Burn The Rope, which if you haven’t played, you should at once. Me? I’m off to watch a video.

How many things have you named? A dog and a couple of rats or hamsters, maybe. Perhaps your car. Hopefully no parts of your anatomy. And that’s usually about it.

But think again. Dozens of RPG heroes. Hundreds of Pokémon. Squads of worms, phalanxes of chaos soldiers – heroes, pets, sidekicks, nemeses. Gamers have more experience naming things than all the world’s entymologists, rabbit breeders and orphanage mistresses put together.

So, the chances are you’ve been through all the systems. System one is usually naming everything after your friends and family. System two is usually naming things after parts of your anatomy, just to see if you can. System three is when you start to get cute, reckoning that it’s worth going through the entire game with a character called ‘Cancer’, just for the moment when ‘You’ve been killed by…’ pops up on your mate’s screen and all the politically correct people in the room heads explode. Stage four is when creative fatigue starts to kick in, and you start sticking with the defaults - not least because checking GameFAQs is a ruinous bore when you can’t remember whether your SpottleBrink was originally Balthier or Basch. Stage five is when you start devising your own systems, naming things alphabetically, or theming them by character class. Stage six is when you start categorising all your different naming systems, all the better to cross-reference.

There’s no doubt that getting it wrong can ruin a game – indeed, the better the game the more ruinous the introduction of a goofy character name can be. And in some games taking over naming duties feels almost sacriligeous. I’ve shared Zelda carts where everyone was so determined to be purist that one save had to be ‘Link’, one ‘LINK’ and one ‘link’.

But after decades of finding names for dinosaur hunters, FOmarls, space pirates and chewnicorns, here’s my question. Are gamers better or worse at naming their kids than normal people? Does our experience pay off, now that we’ve got all the dumb names out of our systems, and have learned the hard way how being kooky and original starts to pall after 300 hours? Or are we over-confident, straying from the ‘A-Z of Baby Names That Grandparents Will Know How To Spell’. Will we give rise to a generation of Sarias and Dantes and Bastilas who’ll never forgive us? And if we do, will they rebel by calling all their Pokémon things like David, John, Mary and Ann?

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.