Happy Christmas? Hope so. Perhaps you ate turkey, watched Doctor Who, and fell asleep in front of the fire. Perhaps you had beef teriyaki, played squash and stayed up late stargazing. Either way, there’s an above average chance you did something that absolute baffles me: played a board game.

I loathe board games, but my defenses are down at Christmas. There’s a roomful of people, each with a bellyful of wine and warmth. Telly seems antisocial, but something must be done if you’re all to avoid dozing off. And someone has a big new box, full of cards and counters and dice and totems and it really does seem like a good idea. This year it was Top Gear: Race The Stig. It seems to have sold out almost everywhere, which is awfully depressing.

Now, even I agree that board games have their merits, one of which is that unlike many Christmas gifts, getting them going doesn’t start with vexations like ‘has anyone got three AAA batteries?’ Should you wish to race The Stig, however, that’s exactly what you’ll need. Instead of dice it has something that looks a little like an executive electronic desk barometer from the 1994 Innovations Catalogue. This controls the game, which consists of you moving your little Stig helmet round the board in a mechanised version of top trumps. As you play you accumulate money, which allows you to upgrade your capabilities (top speed, 0-60, etc). Each time you press the desk barometer, it tells you The Stig’s notional rating in that category. If yours is better you move on six spaces, if it’s worse, you move on one.

Almost everything about the game is shockingly broken. It’s called ‘Race The Stig’, but there is no Stig, and you’re only racing each other. The conceit that represents your upgrade in each category is that you’re buying a better car, but there’s no meaning or advantage to these – all that matters is that you’ve got a level 4 and the desk barometer is currently saying that The Stig has a level 3. There are chance cards, but the pile is so thick, and the number of occasions they are called into use so few, that the tactical parings offered (do you buy an ‘extra fuel tank’ card, to protect against the possibility of getting hit with a ‘you’ve run out of fuel’ card later on?) are totally irrelevant. The game calls for players to continually run other players off the board, for one or more turns, but there is no way to keep track of how many turns players have missed, or of where they were on the board before they got booted off.

I appreciate Race The Stig is not selling to discerning table-toppers. But, much as with videogames, that excuse makes no sense to me. The group of people I was playing with (not least thanks to those winey bellies) were far more in need of a bullet-proof, crystal clear, perfectly balanced play experience than a batch of hardened pros used to wrangled complex games into satisfying submission. Indeed, I tend to find that almost everything I know and understand about videogames applies to board games, which serves to highlight how closely related they are, and reveal the big conundrum I still don’t understand.

Why do I hate board games if I love videogames? They are, functionally, the same thing. Many videogames that I adore are just automated board games. I once spent an entire day proving that you could play Disgaea with nothing more technical than a handful of dice and a shelf of reference books. Admittedly, each move of each character required something like 134 separate calculations, but it could be done by someone with +72 Patience (and possible a stackable Mental Arithmetic bonus). And while Halo, Gradius, Virtua Fighter or Project Gotham may not have board game cousins, it’s obvious that most strategy games, RPGs and many puzzlers are just virtual boxes full of cards and counters, dice and totems. If I love Advance Wars on my GBA – even Dice Wars on my browser – why does my blood run cold when I meet them in the real world?

So these are the questions that I’m left with. Why are so many board games, especially ‘casual’ board games, so dreadful? Are bad board games worse than bad videogames? What is the alchemy that occurs when you turn one into the other? Is it just that videogames are faster than board games? Am I really so much of a savage that I’m drawn purely to the flashing lights and colours? Is the problem that board games are fundamentally social and I am fundamentally not? And can anyone suggest something we can play next year that won’t make my blood boil? And don’t say Wii Sports, or you’re off my Christmas list for good.

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.

The New Scientist has a nice link to a report (PDF alert) from some Austrian AI specialists, which suggests that being neurotic may be a key competitive advantage in gaming. Working with Age Of Mythology, they’ve set out to discover if the attractiveness of a game is affected by how emotionally or neurotically the AI within it behaves. By creating four bots, with normal, aggressive, defensive and neurotic personalities, they discovered that the neurotic version was the most successful, winning as often as the aggressive AI, and in substantially quicker times.

The hallmarks of a neurotic AI? Extreme playing styles, and an irrational assessment of available resources. You’re welcome to quibble about whether or not those are reasonable extrapolations of neuroticism, as defined by the Big Five factors of personality the researchers were working from, but they certainly aren’t traits most game AI designers are aiming for.

I suspect the researchers will ultimately find what any seasoned gamer could have told them off the bat: emotional, irrational AIs sound like a great idea, but it practice they decrease the attractiveness of the game to the player. Those carefully constructed irrationalities can all too often feel like buggy, unfair flaws rather than a sophisticated approximation of a human. AI doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to be reliable – I have extremely fond memories of Advance War’s rock-solid, flawed CPU opponents, who could be relied on to pursue cheap, empty APCs rather than your more valuable units. If they had only done it erratically, it would have driven me mad. But do it rain or shine, day or night, and it becomes a tactical tool.

For many gamers, however, playing against any AI is a shoddy second-best, no substitute for the unpredictable thrill of playing against real people. But isn’t that a contradiction? If unpredictability is a bonus in a human opponent, why is it a flaw in a mechanical one? Here’s the research I’d like those Austrians to do next. Have people play against their neurotic bots. Tell half that it’s an AI opponent, and half that it’s another human player. I put my money on the second group having a better impression of the attractiveness of the game than the first. We’re just fundamentally more forgiving of people than we are of AIs. No wonder they’re turning neurotic.

I’m always uncomfortable around game clones. In one respect they seem to represent the one of the things I like most about gaming culture – that it attracts crowds of iterative magpies, who love the games they play and love the idea that they could make them better. And, in others, it’s gaming at its worst: disrespectful, lazy, shabbily commercialised.

Can’t think what put that issue in my head, especially since I was playing MySims – the DS one – over the weekend. But whether or not you think it’s clone-ware, and whether or not you think clone-ware is evil, you can’t deny that it’s a game that had at its disposal not just a very close role model, but a role model of unusual excellence. So how is that that at every single stage of the first five minutes of MySims, it alienates and annoys me?

The first thing you hit is the language: ” Please choose the gender of your player character,” it asks frostily. Wow, I feel welcomed and connected to your cute, vibrant world. Has EA considered making a driving licence application process simulator, do you think? I reckon that’s a niche it could own.

But I choose, and so, a few hair-cuts and skin colours later, I’m dumped into the world. Town is due east, I’m told by the charisma-free ship’s captain. Great, I think, and prepare to set off, only to have my gender-assigned-player-character whisked out of my control. It trots into town, starts chasing a boy in a dog-helmet, runs out of puff (why couldn’t I chose the fitness of my player-character, hmm?) and decides to walk into a building. Brilliant. So much for me forging any early, precious sense of identity with that player-character. Why tell me I need to go east if you’re not going to let me go where I want? Why assume I’d want to chase the boy?

Never mind. Here I am in a house, with a woman. I can, the game chirps, ‘touch the Sim directly to initiate conversation’. I tell you, there’s not a weekend goes by here without our neighbours calling the police cos we’re all initiating conversations like crazy. Plus, if it’s suddenly OK to call her a Sim, why couldn’t we have been calling my player-character that from the beginning? Wouldn’t that have made it seem a bit more like an engaging, consistent world?

But here I am carping away, when this Sim, who I have touched, is experiencing a crisis. Her grandson is missing, and she’s too busy to talk to me. Also too busy, it seems, to do anything except stand still. Certainly too busy to go and look for her grandson. I wait for further instructions, but sadly the game doesn’t say if I can ‘touch the Sim to instill a sense of responsibility and constructive effort’. So, I haul myself off to where on the map the grandson is, play a mini-game (mini-task, really) to get him to come to his senses and Whoop! He hadn’t realised how worried she was. He’s going to head straight back. Except, in what I’m beginning to understand is a family trait, he’s going to accomplish that by standing rooted to the spot. I check his status screen. He’s ‘heading quietly back to the mayor’s home’, the game assures me. More imperceptibly than quietly, it would seem.

Not to worry. Back to the lady mayor’s house to explain that she can relax, I’ve found the lost boy, but he’s lost the use of his legs. However, in the course of his adventure he’s clearly gained miraculous replacement powers of locomotion because as I enter the house – pling! I see on the map that he’s teleported straight home at the last minute. Quick work – almost as impressive as how effectively the game entirely de-valued the point of me going to get him. Is there a quicker way for a game to strip away all that boring, colourful, appealing game-world stuff and reveal its core mechanics in all their ugly, empty, manipulative glory?

And then there’s a flower-planting task – how could there not be? But instead of giving me any creative input, or any sense of customisation or ownership of the world, the game gives me a pocketful of identical red tulips and demands I place them in pre-ordained flower beds. Fine. I do eight, get bored, return to the quest giver. No dice. I’ve got to put them in ALL the spaces in ALL the flower beds. Fine. Back to the flower beds. Not fine. There are 14 spaces and only 10 slots in my inventory, so I’ve run out. Now I understand why the flower-lady said I could come back for more ‘if I ran out.’ Although I don’t quite understand why she didn’t say ‘when I ran out’, since the game had made that an inevitability. But fine. Back to her, and back to the flower beds. At least, I think, I’ll end up with 6 bonus tulips. I return for my pat on the head, and she takes the spare tulips off me. Not fine.

And on it goes. Three screens of repeated dialogue to get into each shop. Shops that dump you out of the whole process if you decide you’ve picked the wrong category. Mini-games that don’t have a retry option. Characters who you trek across the world to find, and who then teleport when you’re six feet away, because the clock trips from day to night and they’re supposed to be home. The game itself, when you get to it, might be brilliant. But why make it so hard to get to it? Why have an otherwise functioning, appealing game riddled with so many tiny, cheap, fixable hiccups?

Five minutes in, and I take it all back. MySims is radically, daringly unique. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where every single interaction I’ve encountered from game start to first save is so needlessly flawed. Maybe instead of Animal Crossing, EA should have cribbed a bit harder from The 400.

The conversation I most dread is the one that starts: ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but it’s quite…unusual that you’re a woman.’ My smartypants answer is that is perfectly usual for me, thank you very much, but I’m sympathetic to the point being made. Women are still a minority amongst conventional gamers, and it’s rarer still for those women to make gaming their job. But while I agree it’s a fair point that I’m in an unusual position, I still dread the questions that follow it. I have no good explanation for what it is that drew me to gaming. I still don’t know if I saw something in gaming that most women don’t notice but would like if they did, or if games found something in me that most women don’t have and wouldn’t want if they could. I’m profoundly uncomfortable being asked to be a spokesman for 51% of the world’s population, especially since the only thing we know about me for sure is that I’m an oddity.

But the commercial necessity behind better exploiting that 51% remains, so the question is going to keep coming up. And from now on, I’m going to answer it by referring people to ‘Is There Anything Good About Men?’, a paper given at the American Psychological Association’s annual conference by Dr Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University. In it, he suggests that most cultures are equally, but differently, exploitative of men and women, leading to a situation where men are more attuned to wide, distributed networks that reward competition and specialisation, and women prize small, intimate social networks which thrive on co-operation and generalisation. You’re bound to disagree with some or all of his points, but it’s well worth a read – it’s long, but light – and got me thinking in some new ways about game design.

What’s particularly interesting to me is that the gender imbalance he describes is evident even in the way that very conversation tends to go: women who ask me about how I got started in games follow up with small-scale social questions – how have I been treated, do I encounter prejudice, am I self-conscious when playing in front of a male audience. The men get very rapidly side-tracked on to specialist, general-scale questions. If I mention Dungeon Master as being the first moment when games took over my life, women ask me how my parents felt about my new hobby, or if it brought me greater acceptance among male friends. Men, on hearing this news, are more likely to move on to wondering whatever happened to FTL, or whether or not I’d ever tried completing it with only one character.

So allowing that I find the root of Baumeister’s argument plausible, what does it mean for the great Girls In Games debate? In asking why more women don’t play games, we worried a lot, initially, about surface things – boy-games were too violent, too lasers-and-robots. What we needed was girl-games about shopping, horses and make-up! Now, thankfully, we’ve moved a little past that (despite the fact that games about shopping, horses and make-up do seem to be proving particularly successful with young female consumers, particularly on the DS), and are looking at important external factors. So we’ve noted that for games to be attractive to women they need to be available on hardware they feel comfortable with, and offer play-patterns that are compatible with busy, often fragmented lives.

But what Baumeister’s paper makes me think about is whether or not we’re neglecting an examination of more basic gameplay issues. Does his thesis suggest that women would be more comfortable with a game which had a small cast of characters than either none or many? Does his theory that women see less advantage in specialisation mean that they’ll be alienated by the common RPG mechanic where levelling-up in one field disables your potential in another? Should risk-reward ratios be normalised – smaller risks for smaller rewards – for games aimed at girls rather than boys? By which I mean, could you produce a functionally identical game – same visuals, same interface, same goals, same structures – but tune it to appeal more to one gender or another?

And, actually, Dungeon Master might not be a bad place to start. Would women prefer it if the initial character choice was smaller? Would they enjoy exploring more if the mazes were more compact, but contained more hidden detail? Would they warm more to a levelling-up system that was fuelled by the characters’ interactions (rather like Disgaea 2′s spell-learning system, where characters can learn magic by osmosis, simply by standing near their spell-casting father-figures). Would they (oh, the hate-mail) like it better if it was easier?

Actually, in a transparent attempt to divert you from your poison pen, I’m going to point you to Return To Chaos, a Windows port of Dungeon Master, for those too impatient to find it for Steem, or those too lazy to unearth their ST from the attic. Don’t hesitiate to play it if you haven’t before, and if you have, don’t worry about whether your fond memories of it will survive having their rose-tinted spectacles ripped off. It hasn’t aged a button.

I met my hero the other night. My excitement was bowed a bit by the fact that he was dead, and turned out to be a bit of a moaner, but only a bit. Even odder was the fact that until I’d met him, I’d never even heard of him. But, after one rambling, ghostly conversation, I realised I was his biggest fan.

Franclorn Forgewright is the greatest architect in all of Azeroth, responsible for the immense doors of Blackrock Depths and who knows how many other pieces of monumental masonry across the world of WarCraft. It was all I could do not to ask for his autograph. My bovine roots may mean I spend a lot of my time in elaborate yurts and bone-stitched tepees, but not even my hatred of the Alliance can dent my admiration of Ironforge and Stormwind. To meet the man who devised these stone-wrought colossi was something I never though a humble druid from Mulgore would get to do. His cities are as much machines as homes, as much statues as settlements, radiating history, hostility and grandeur. And so what was I ever going to say to his request for help but ‘yes’? Allowing that ‘For the Horde!’ didn’t really seem appropriate.

And that means it’s the first quest in who knows how long I’ve given a damn about in WoW. I don’t read the preambles, only the instructions. I still don’t really know why we’re at war, especially since Mulgore seems a haven of peace and plenty and not much troubled by scourges. I feel no sense of allegiance to Thrall, and I only hate the Alliance because they fanny around so hopelessly in Warsong Gulch. My commitment to the game has always been about the setting, not the story, until all of a sudden the setting became the story and I felt I owed this man – this grumpy ghost of my enemy – a debt of honour as real as I’ve owed to any human player. At a time when there’s so much talk of story in games, it properly baffles me that the debate remains fixated on dialogue and character design when good games have known for years that architecture is the best narrator you could ever hope for, reading from a script that never tires.

So while I know it’s really Chris Metzen or Bill Petras or Justin Thavirat I should be chasing with my autograph book, I’m going to stick with directing my gratitude to Franclorn Forgewright. Not least because he’s a lot more likely to give me rare epix! in return. Thanks, Franc. Thancs.

I was showing a friend the opening of Final Fantasy XII today (having forgotten what an amazingly pretty downer that is – ten minutes in and he’s dead, she’s dead, he’s killed him and him, and the evil empire that killed your parents has actually stamped on your flowers) and it made me realise why stories in games will always be rubbish.

It’s not the old interactivity-vs-narrative problem – although I’m still convinced that they remain the opposite ends of an increasingly threadbare piece of string – it’s this: game stories have to rationalise the fact that every single thing in the world revolves around you. You are the person the shops were built for, the crates stacked for, the mines laid for. You’re who the girls wait for, the enemies spawn for and the NPCs patrol for. Sure, games like Oblivion work pretty hard to convince you that it all goes on even when you’re not around, but at best it feels like Westworld – an eerie bonhomie that only fools you if you want it to.

Any story in which only one person can be the agent of change is always likely to feel trite. It’s a fairytale pattern, whether that person is fairly fairyish (Link) or not at all (Doomguy). It’s why saving the world is still the main occupation in any game where you don’t have a football or an Enzo. How could anything less be possibly be expected of you if you’re the person the world revolves around? It would be churlish not to. The stories in films and books uusually revolve around a powerless person scraping together enough potency to make a big dramatic change – whether it’s dying gracefully, or usurping a vicious drill sergeant, or organising a really good batchelor party. And if the heroes are presidents, superheroes or single-mothers-with-unstoppable-guts-and-integrity, then the story is the recognition and defeat of their *actual* weakness, which usually turns out to be Gerald Depardieu or hydrophobia or something equally lame. But in games, even if you start with a weedy pistol, or 10HP, you’re still the most powerful – often the only powerful – person in the world. And that gives you two big problems: first, it means that it’s very hard for game stories not to be hyperbolic, and second, it makes it very hard for them not all to be the same. The set-dressing may change from sci-fi to fantasy to WWII (although not much further) and the telling may change from the perfunctory to the inept to the elegant, but can you name three games that tell a story which isn’t about someone who saves the world by doing the same few things over and over?

Actually – I can. GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. How about that?

Finishing what I started below, here’s the rest of my list of people I wish would take a side-step into game development.

Colin St John Wilson

He’s not a man I know much about, but he designed a building I know very well: the British Library at St Pancras, in London. A lot of people loathe it – it’s a bit too square and a bit too red, but as this book cover shows, the inside is a very different proposition. Wilson designed the interior with a lot of thought for the people who would use it – people who would come to the building every day, perhaps for years, and always with heads full of abstract information. Consequently, there are no obvious routes through its sun-bright atrium. Rather than forcing its visitors into a daily, identical trudge, Wilson wanted them to wander, to find short-cuts and distractions. And it works. Even when I was going there every day, I would find that my feet downright refused to settle into a pattern. Which meant that a man who I’d never met was using 400,000 tons worth of brick and glass to control my movements. Games are only just beginning to understand how they can use their architecture to tell their stories and manipulate their players, but I suspect it will take the input of people like Wilson to fully exploit it. Other things to like about the British Library include the five-story, inside-out, library-within-a-library, the thing that looks a bit like a sniper tower, and the fact that it’s as useful for impressing your mother as it is for meeting girls.

Cornelius

This one’s a bit of a cheat, because the musician known as Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) already makes games – or at least the sountracks for them, as anyone who’s had the chance to chime hypnotically with Coloris can testify. But what makes it less of a cheat is that he’s probably the only person on this list who’d stand a chance of actually making something you could play. His credentials, other than Coloris, are impeccable, in that his son is actually called Mario, and his (brilliant) videos make it pretty clear that he could give Minter, Mizuguchi and Iwai a run for their money. Especially since he doesn’t have a weakness for yaks, The Black-Eyed Peas or improbably impratical musical instruments, and would be be guaranteed to involve monkeys somewhere along the line. He might need a bit of help on the character design front, though.

Men Of Science

This is definitely a cheat, but right now it’s the one I’m most excited about. I would like (take note, any passing VC-samaritans looking to sink millions into a vanity project with a prospective market of one) these guys to make me a shmup. Look at that stuff! It’s astonishing, and ten times as extraordinary as anything I’ve seen in a game all year. I want to streak over the surface of two m-plane sapphire substrates at 200 miles an hour, never mind 200x magnification. I want to bury quad-rocket charges into the spaghetti-genitalia of a Copepod lophoura – surely standing by to take the ‘most phallic enemy since Xenon 2′s foreskin plants’ prize – and blast it to mush. I want to slice through the sky as cleanly as a microchannel for flow-stretching DNA. Who’s with me? All we need is Treasure, a million dollars, and the phone-number for the guy who’s got the Fantastic Voyage licence.

Finishing what I started below, here’s the rest of my list of people I wish would take a side-step into game development.

Colin St John Wilson

He’s not a man I know much about, but he designed a building I know very well: the British Library at St Pancras, in London. A lot of people loathe it – it’s a bit too square and a bit too red, but as this book cover shows, the inside is a very different proposition. Wilson designed the interior with a lot of thought for the people who would use it – people who would come to the building every day, perhaps for years, and always with heads full of abstract information. Consequently, there are no obvious routes through its sun-bright atrium. Rather than forcing its visitors into a daily, identical trudge, Wilson wanted them to wander, to find short-cuts and distractions. And it works. Even when I was going there every day, I would find that my feet downright refused to settle into a pattern. Which meant that a man who I’d never met was using 400,000 tons worth of brick and glass to control my movements. Games are only just beginning to understand how they can use their architecture to tell their stories and manipulate their players, but I suspect it will take the input of people like Wilson to fully exploit it. Other things to like about the British Library include the five-story, inside-out, library-within-a-library, the thing that looks a bit like a sniper tower, and the fact that it’s as useful for impressing your mother as it is for meeting girls.

Cornelius

This one’s a bit of a cheat, because the musician known as Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) already makes games – or at least the sountracks for them, as anyone who’s had the chance to chime hypnotically with Coloris can testify. But what makes it less of a cheat is that he’s probably the only person on this list who’d stand a chance of actually making something you could play. His credentials, other than Coloris, are impeccable, in that his son is actually called Mario, and his (brilliant) videos make it pretty clear that he could give Minter, Mizuguchi and Iwai a run for their money. Especially since he doesn’t have a weakness for yaks, The Black-Eyed Peas or improbably impratical musical instruments, and would be be guaranteed to involve monkeys somewhere along the line. He might need a bit of help on the character design front, though.

Men Of Science

This is definitely a cheat, but right now it’s the one I’m most excited about. I would like (take note, any passing VC-samaritans looking to sink millions into a vanity project with a prospective market of one) these guys to make me a shmup. Look at that stuff! It’s astonishing, and ten times as extraordinary as anything I’ve seen in a game all year. I want to streak over the surface of two m-plane sapphire substrates at 200 miles an hour, never mind 200x magnification. I want to bury quad-rocket charges into the spaghetti-genitalia of a Copepod lophoura – surely standing by to take the ‘most phallic enemy since Xenon 2′s foreskin plants’ prize – and blast it to mush. I want to slice through the sky as cleanly as a microchannel for flow-stretching DNA. Who’s with me? All we need is Treasure, a million dollars, and the phone-number for the guy who’s got the Fantastic Voyage licence.