Limbering up for my L4D playdate this evening reminded me of the rather brilliant Left 4k Dead which did the rounds some time ago, which in turn made me think of other brilliant tiny games.

Grandaddy, of course, is Wolfenstein 5k, but you might have trouble getting it to run in your space-faring, jet-pack-toting browser-of-the-future. Current darling is the 5k Lunar Lander, where Seb Lee-Delisle shows off by doing first a straight remake and then a 3D version in under 5120 bytes, as part of a competition run by the rather awesome sounding  £5 App club. Which just goes to show that 5k is probably a bit generous, surely the thinking behind the annual Java 4k compo, which this year has a reworking of PixelJunk Eden, some improbably lavish atmospherics, courtesy of 4bsolution, and a nice crisp Tetris-meets-that-colour-clearing-game-I-don’t-know-the-name-of.

4k starting to look a bit too generous? Then why not take a stab at Tetris in 500 bytes? Sick of all this reductivist retroism? Then check out what 432k can get you, which turns out to be blowing up Battersea Power Station, complete with smoke and sound, in A New Zero, which also wins my favourite-game-FAQ-ever award.

Still to big for your tastes? Then fetch your reading glasses and head over to Defender of the Favicon. If you get there and you can’t spot the game, then you’ve rather missed the tiny, tiny point.

Last night I slept like a dragon, roosting on a pile of new treasures.  If I was a shallower person, I’d just be here to brag about my amazing new rainbow-filled Parappa pick, or my forces-you-to-overcome-years-of-disk-ruining-paranoia-to-use-it hand-made Ranarama coaster. If I was a slighter better person, I’d type out a full transcript of the character descriptions in the DC Bangai-O manual I snaffled yesterday, instead of just teasing you with:

Mrs M, informer: A very attractive woman with whom you communicate via all news satellites positioned in space. She conveys highly useful, yet at times totally stupid information. Infortunately she is very miserly and demands high information fees. Normally a housewife residing in Manami Senju who has been married for three years, she keeps her activities as an informer secret from her husband. She allegedly buys ties or stuff like that from her husband’s income.

Sabu, street urchin: As his reputation says he plays the lowest role in the Cosmo Gang. He appears and disappears again and again. Nobody knows if it’s the same person or if he has a double. He dreams of his own  office some time in the future. Unfortunately, he is not very talented when it comes to preparing octopus pellets and simply can’t resist the waffles of goldfish salesmen.

As it is, since I’m a somewhere-in-the-middle person, I’ll give you complete scans of the wraparound Japanese boxart for Jet Set Radio, which is a masterpiece of matt-finish colour-clash brilliance (apologies that my aged scanner can’t really do it justice), and a bonus discofied treat of the silver Jap DC Space Channel 5 box.

Let me know if you want super-high res versions. And, in case that hasn’t sweetened your day enough, here’s a whole funky micro-subculture I found while googling for Parappa ukelele tab. And thank you R, and thank you T! Giving truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Exciting navigatory update! All my columns for Boing Boing‘s marvellous game site Offworld, in which I explore the charms of games I can’t stop going back to, are now available from the sidebar to your right. Or, if you’d rather take them in at a glance, they’re all to be had here.

As promised to various lovely people at GDC here are the slides from the two talks I did. Once I get back I’ll do revised versions with notes of what I said, so they seem slightly less like the jumbled imaginings of an 18th century boot-polish addict, but for now:

Spore: what seriously happened.

Stop Wasting My Time And Your Money: why your game doesn’t need a story to be a hit.

I’m about half-way into my Great 2008 Game Catch-up, which means I’ve reached Mass Effect, which I know is strictly speaking a 2007 release, but I’ve been avoiding up till now because I have a phobia about weird teeth – too big, too matte, too white, too gappy – in games, and I felt strongly (and rightly) that this would trigger it.
There’s lots to say about it, of course, precious little of which hasn’t been said already. I am rather impressed with its ability to crash in frequent and deeply symbolic ways. Getting trapped in the pause menu felt like some big fat ludic meta-gag, and the way the lighting dropped out when I first boarded the Normandy as captain, meaning I was left blundering in the dark at the moment when I was supposed to be assuming command, was borderline poetry.

If there was one bit of the game I was expecting not to surprise me, though, it was the sex bit, seeing as I’d seen a dozen videos and read a hundred news reports and blog rants. But, jeepers! No wonder everyone was so exercised by it. It happens so early on! It’s so amazingly perfunctory! You get – or at least I got – precisely no choice in it! She read my fortune badly, I said ‘is that it?’, or something else which I had never considered could serve as a come-on, and within seconds, we’re hard at it. Yet again, in a game that’s supposed to be all about choice, all about exploring moral depth, I’m giving a complex, nuanced palette of options about whether or not to sign an autograph, and no autonomy whatsoever when it comes to life’s little trifles, like fighting and fucking. Give it ten years and people are going to be suing for virtual rape when game designers force sexual encounters on player-made avatars, mark my words. Acutally, give it five.

That isn’t really what surprised me, though. What surprised me was that I expected to be annoyed by the anondyne cop-out of what’s actually shown, of the blue hand banging inelegantly against the wall. Games with mature ratings (or even 12s from the capable-of-understanding-context-and-presentation BBFC) ought to be able to find more honest and more natural ways of showing what happens when a man and a space consort love each other very much. But what I discovered, of course, is that that’s not what’s happening, because with me in the room are my new best friends Urdnot Wrex and Tali’Zorah nar Rayya. Are orgies more or less stressful with people you barely know, I wonder? Will we, by the 22nd century, have evolved beyond the need for a white wine spritzer and some awkward small talk to kick things off? So of course Bioware don’t dare pan below the wrist. Who knows what’s happening down there? Do krogans have that carapace all over, do you think? Do quarians even have mouths? Is Shepherd using his d-pad commands – pull back, pull back! focus your assaults here! – to co-ordinate it all? What would have happened if I’d unlocked Intimidate before I went in?

I spend a lot of time arguing for more sex in more games; it’s downright perverse that games don’t reflect something which is such a key component of the human condition. It’s probably for the best, though, if we don’t start with non-consensual inter-species gang-bangs. Especially if they’ve got those freaky teeth.

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.