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.

Edinburgh ’08 report:

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I regret: 2

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I don’t regret: 19

Number of things I said that would have made the internet really angry if it had been in the room at the time but it wasn’t so phew: 487,943

Number of people I promised I really would get a ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’ T-shirt made: 3

Gosh,  Edinburgh’s lovely. I really ought to know that by now, for all sorts of reasons, but it still takes me by surprise every time. But it was great to get a chance to load up on plain bread, and see a bunch of old friends, and catch up with all the Dare students as they all get one step closer to taking over the world.

The rather ramshackle slides for my rather ramshackle talk are here (sorry, 13 meg pdf or so, somehow). Fair disclosure: the notes represent what I had been planning to say if I’d had rather more sleep rather than what I actually managed to blurt out on the day, so apologies if they don’t mesh very well with what you heard. A lot of people have been asking me for the Patrick Redding talk, which you can get here, and really, if you’re only going to read one of them, read his and not mine, because his is properly brilliant.  Thanks again to EIF and Dare for inviting me up: good games, good people, good beer, bad weather. God, I miss Scotland.

Develop ’08 report

Lost:  my voice, one earring, one suspected-knock-off, only-slightly-insanely-expensive, 60W MagSafe power adapter (now recovered), one phone USB cable, one bag of clothes (left in a taxi, returned 2 hours later by extraordinarily kind taxi driver)

Most coveted thing face-off: giant Space Invaders commemorative 100 yen coin vs Animal Crossing Happy Room Academy catalogue

Brighton restaurant recommendations:  breakfast – Bill’s for scrambled egg with pumpkin seeds on top and juice brilliance (thanks, T!);  lunch – Bankers for fish and chips (thanks, R!); dinner – Pintxo for delicious peppers and amazo-rasperry/coffee freddo things (thanks, me!).

Unforgettable moment face-off: swimming in the sea with Charles Cecil vs four-man The Final Countdown Band Bros.

New personal best: talking so much my tongue got blisters.

Best new skill learned: how to get an elephant into a fridge.

Cheers to everyone who lasted the distance to come to my talk – super quick’n'dirty slides-with-notes are here. Thanks to Owain for inviting me along, and to everyone who fed my brain-hamster with new ideas.

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.

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.

I don’t usually post about things from the past, but I couldn’t quite let these comments on the Next-Gen/Edge re- branding go unrevised. It’s understandable that Colin’s got a bit muddled, since he wasn’t involved with Edge at the time, but it’s not quite right to say that Edge had ‘never much bothered with the web’. It certainly isn’t how I would characterise the great deal of hard work that went in to the old Edge Online – initially from Jim Rossingol, and then latterly Brandon Boyer, as well as a number of Edge staffers over the years. Thanks to their efforts and general brilliance, Edge Online was one of Future’s most successful blog-based sites, and much loved by many, including me, even though it’s very un-British to admit to loving the things you make yourself. When I moved up to editor it wasn’t part of my remit any more, and it lay mostly dormant for a while before Next-Gen stepped into the breech. I’m sure the new Edge site will prove a huge success, but I’ll always miss the old one, even if I won’t miss laboriously hacking out all the wrongly-coded quotation marks. And it’s nice to have a chance to say thanks to Brandon and Jim and Steve and Ben and Duncan and all the other excellent chaps who made it such a uniquely omnivorous, considered, accurate, eloquent and wry place to be. The new crew have a lot to live up to.

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]