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.

Home from Birmingham, that is. My E3 verdict? Glad I didn’t go. By all accounts it sounded tame, contained, and underwhelming, although interesting to see that PSN rather stole the show with The Last Guy and Fat Princess and a better look at PixelJunk Eden, which I’d already made my mind up to love long before the screens started trickling out, but whoosh! and yay! and ooh!

No, I’ve spent the last week (and will spend next week) going round a much nicer, friendlier, and more exciting game show which is rather quixotically based – simultaneously -  in Dundee, Birmingham, Dublin, London and Brighton. And it’s got shorter queues and better sandwiches than E3.

It’s Dare To Be Digital, the UK’s leading student game-making competition, now in its 9th year, with 17 teams, based in five cities, all of whom have 10 weeks to make a playable prototype and which seems to be over-flowing with an embarrassment of good ideas. Channel 4 is the main sponsor this year, so as part of my work with them I’ve been running around poking my nose in, having a chat with the teams, and getting to play their games. I’ve been round about half so far, and I’ve genuinely been more excited about what I’ve seen there than anything that came out of E3. With the possibly exception of the life-changing  Duke Nukem Trilogy trailer.

So if E3 has left you a bit deflated, and you’d rather be fantasising about being a spring-loaded, magnetically-armed, bitmap-trailing, colour-coded, shoe-tree battling, origami-folding photographer than trying to get excited about Tomb Raider Underworld, then head over to the website and send some votes and encouragements to the team you think looks the most promising. The games will all be available to play at Protoplay from 10-12th August in Edinburgh, so you’ll be able to see for yourself whether or not I’m over-stating the case that it’s in these kind of environments that the interesting stuff is happening.

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]

I was up at Game Republic last night, sitting on a panel unusually rich in Edge DNA, which was a very pleasant way to spend an evening. In amongst arguing about how many popes died having sex (Google it at your peril), we also hit on the eternal ‘games need better stories to attract girls’ proposition. My problem with this line of reasoning isn’t just the fact that female gaming hours are mostly put into non-narrative games, but that it tends to trap the games industry into a bafflingly self-defeating series of assumptions, which go like this:

Games need to be more emotionally engaging.

The way to emotionally engage players is with better stories.

Stories are about plot and character.

Plot and character are best explored through dialogue.

Dialogue is best expressed via high-fidelity character models and voice actors.

Every single point along that road is wrong. And every single point along that road takes games somewhere expensive and difficult.

Emotionally complex games are great, but so are emotionally crude – or indeed emotionally barren – games. If only emotionally sophisticated games are great, I wouldn’t have spent two hours yesterday playing Verbosity.

Games are perfectly capable of emotionally engaging their players without story. I have an incredibly rich emotional connection with Guitar Hero because of the hours I spent being rubbish at the violin, because of the years when bad 80s rock was an essential escape from a dorky childhood, because of the memories I have of playing live on stage with the lovely (and sickeningly good) Jonathan Smith, because of the pride I have in my eventual mastery of Expert. These are all complex emotions. They have nothing to do with narrative. They have everything to do with why Guitar Hero is a brilliant game.

Stories don’t need to be about plot or characters. Even leaving aside the emergent stories that players create for themselves through their interactions (whether it’s getting stuck up a pillar for 3 hours in Warcraft or pulling off some amazing victory in PES), there are games that tell stories implicitly through their character design, their architecture, their music, their mechanics. Don’t believe me? Go play Gravitation.

And even if you have characters you want to explore and narrative threads you want to unspool, dialogue isn’t the only, nor necessarily the best way to do it. Shadow Of The Colossus has a story that’s told almost entirely without dialogue, despite it having a formal narrative and strong characterisation. It tells its story through the landscape, through animation, through subtleties of the control scheme. I get more sense of the hero’s character, and of the background narrative of the game, through they way that he’s slightly too small for his horse, shown by the idle animation that has him twist in the saddle to relieve the pressure on his hips – through the way the control scheme requires him to put his trust in a horse that has more experience of being ridden than he has of riding – than I would get from an hour of torpid dialogue.

But even if you’re certain you want plot, characters and dialogue, cinematic cut-scenes – even interactive cinematic cut-scenes – are the single most expensive and failure-fraught way games can try to deliver them. Emily Short does a great job in her Gamasutra column of demonstrating that ‘simple’ games like the time-management classic Miss Management have enormous potential for sophisticated, character driven narrative, at a fraction of the cost and the risk.

So please, someone do me a T-shirt I can wear to my next panel, so I don’t have to foam and rant at another roomful of perfectly nice papal sexologists.

Emotion =/= Story =/= Plot =/= Dialogue =/= Cut scene.

Final, hate-mail anticipation disclaimer: I’m not saying that any of these things are bad in themselves. There should be games with cinematic cut-scenes, should be games with gallons of dialogue, should be games with intricate plots, should be games which engage their players through rich stories. All I’m saying is that this is only one strategy, out of hundreds that games can employ, and that it’s an expensive strategy that’s difficult to pull off. There is no one right answer.

I have a new crusade. Can’t we make more boring games? Or rather, since we have plenty boring-gameplay games already, and plenty boring-story games already, can’t we make more games that are boring to look at? This week I’ve been alternating between Eternal Sonata, which is opulent in colour, detail, variety and the number of irrelevant little translucent things floating around at any one time, and The Fool’s Errand, which is, well – see for yourselves:

Which one has made the strongest visual impression on me? Fool’s Errand, no doubt. For those of you who aren’t, as I wasn’t, up on your late ’80s Mac puzzle games, The Fool’s Errand is a tarot-inspired precursor to games like the Professor Layton series. An over-arching story leads you from self-contained puzzle to self-contained puzzle, testing your memory, visual acuity, anagram instincts, logic skills and wretched, dogged persistence (unless you happen to like word searches). You can download it, and the executor needed to run it here, and I heartily recommend that you do. Not least because the graphical choices made out of necessity at the time mean it now looks both modern and timeless, which I swear isn’t a contradiction.

It’s got me thinking, though, about why there aren’t more monochrome games. Why were we so quick to leave black and white behind as we moved on from Pong and Spacewar!, and so quick to assume that these 15, 52, 512 or 16.7 million new colours were necessities not possibilities? Why, other than the small consideration of it being certain commercial suicide, did so few designers chose to keep things monotonous? Why can’t I think of a single voluntarily black-and-white game, from the last ten years, since my best candidate, Vib Ribbon, turns out to have a little hint of pastel indulgence in its scoring display.

However, to my delight, there’s a resurgence, led by those reliably awesome indiekids (even if they’re indiekids who’ve since been hired by the biggest game company in the world) behind Echochrome and Switch:

Beautiful both. So that’s my new crusade: more black and white games. From now on, I spurn the false god that is colour and pledge my heart and my thumbs to my new messiah, monotony. Until, that is, someone goes and spoils it all by sending me a poster of Okami. Swoon.

Thanks to having The Best Job In The World, I get to spend a fair bit of time brainstorming game pitches. These, I’ve noticed, fall into three categories. By far the most popular is the hybrid. ‘It’s Halo meets Cooking Mama!’ someone will declare, or reveal a sheaf of sketches demonstrating how Sid Meier’s Pirates! can be modded to work with the Wii Fit balance board. My experience of these is that the dumber the hybrids initially sound, the more fruitful the the design direction tends to be in the long run. Last week I sat in a room while someone explained a new project as ‘Mario Kart meets the single game in the entire world you’d think most unlikely to ever meet Mario Kart ever‘. I can’t tell you what that game was, because it’ll blow the team’s idea (feel free to barrage the comments with guesses, though), but I did have to grind the entire meeting to a point to vent my baffled scepticism. Three minutes later I was all smiles and nods. Obviously!

Then there is the blank sheet of paper. The actually new idea. These don’t come around nearly so often, and when they do they are brilliant and scary and hard. That initial blank sheet of paper soon becomes hundreds of pages of dense design doc, denied the pithy shorthands that more derivative ideas can take advantage of. Real, proper thinking has to be done. Imaginations are audibly stretched. Getting to be involved in projects like these is always a privilege but it’s a tiring, challenging and not infrequently demoralising one: actually new ideas have a scarily high failure rate.

But then there’s the anti-game. The deceptively simple process of taking an existing game and flipping its ideas – its rulesets, its assumptions, its goals, its resources and restrictions – and finding something new. I have one of those on my desk at the moment, which takes a gaming classic and adds one bit of red pen to the core design idea. And that little bit of red pen changes everything – it’s like in Saramago’s The History of the Siege Of Lisbon, where a proof-reader impulsively inserts a ‘not’ into a sentence in a history book and inadvertently remakes the entire world. I love working on anti-games; it turns game design into a game in itself, as the thought-experiment unravels and you have to jump ahead anticipating and extrapolating the consequences of that initial reversal.

Still not convinced? Then let me bring you today’s favourite anti-game. Yesterday I sent you off to Burn The Rope. Today, I invite you to solve a Fruit Mystery (sound required for both). It does exactly the opposite thing to YHTBTR, in exactly the opposite way, and yet made me exactly the same kind of happy, exactly as much. Good times, good times.

My GDC swag this year consists of: 2 USB memory sticks, 1 bruised spine, 6000 air miles, dozens of business cards, a 3-figure mobile phone bill and hundreds of un-answered emails. So, apologies if you’re waiting for me to get back to you – I’m catching up, I promise. In the meantime, as literally several of you have requested, here’s the powerpoint (10 meg, sorry) for my ‘Treat Me Like A Lover’ session. I’m not sure how much sense the slides will make on their own, so I’m working on a transcript, which I’ll post up here when it’s done. Hopefully GDCRadio will be up soon, so you can download it there, in the highly unlikely event you want to spend $8 on hearing me be smutty about Advance Wars. Cheers to everyone who turned out at the painful hour of 9am Friday to hear me rant, and thanks for all the kind comments after.