"A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit & be inhabited by. What you infuse a space w/ to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul…

Zelda would be better if it had no story…no plot to structure the adventure…first Zs barely had any plot…were better for it. With plot, sequence matters too much…early Zs had situations, worlds & scenarios that framed action, gaps to be filled in by player, sequences to be broken. Optimal paths & shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned. Items were the most prominent plot devices, & even they were not unduly strict about order. You could be slow & steady or blast straight through with a little know-how…basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot."

…a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, independence, sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around."

Some say the story begins with the CD-i. The real story however begins with the growing use of CD-ROM and the emergence of multimedia - devices that played games, movies, music, edutainment and more.

"I used to prefer Vimeo over YouTube. Vimeo was always a bit better in quality, had a nicer looking player and website. Most importantly, it had a more mature and tasteful community. So when I released my game TRAUMA, it was a no-brainer to publish the trailer for it on Vimeo. It was an arty project that was made exactly for the kind of audience I would meet on Vimeo.

Today, I’m regretting that decision…"

"The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed."

"However, one thing that has become increasingly difficult to find has been anything related to video games. Specifically, indie video games. Vimeo's long been the go-to space for heralded indie titles like Sword and Sworcery to tease viewers with glimpses of in-development games. Yet, indie devlopers are finding themselves running afoul of an edict that forbids video of gameplays for users at the Basic and Plus levels of membership. To have gameplay videos hosted, users must purchase the Pro level at a cost of $199/year. That may not seem like a lot, but considering how many indie games get made by one- or two-person teams with no other source of income, it can be a big difference.

After seeing a flurry of tweets about the Vimeo policy earlier today, Kotaku reached out to Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer for his take on the situation. His editorial follows:"

"But wait… That wasn’t all they did. They disabled embedding of all content on our site, even the things we had made ourselves. Sure, the videos were still available by going directly to Vimeo.com and going into our account, but embedding was gone, so every occurrence of a video on our site was replaced with a block that said “embedding has been disabled for this site.”"

Origin of various video game character's names.

Over the last few years, I've been collecting examples of metagames — not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames. Most of these, like Desert Bus or Quest for the Crown, are one-joke games for a quick laugh. Others, like Cow Clicker and Upgrade Complete, are playable critiques of game mechanics. Some are even (gasp!) fun.

Video games are art, just not in the way we would traditionally think of or perceive. Perhaps not a high art, but art nonetheless. It is true that no video game has ever been considered to be on par with any great work of art, and I believe none can be deemed as such, for now. It’s a young art form. And I’m sure that if Roger were asked that same question with regards to film, when movies where merely nickelodeon pieces, he’d say the same thing.

I don’t know who’s finally going to invent antigravity or Mr Fusion, or bring peace to the Middle East. But that kid who beat Duke Nukem 3D in less than 21 minutes looks promising to me.

Angry Birds is the first waste of 75 millions people’s time that can be accurately quantified. Every day, users spend 200 million minutes — 16 years every hour — playing the mobile game. Three trillion pigs have been popped. It has filled billions of those interstitial moments spent riding the bus, on a plane or in important work meetings, and it is or has been the number-one paid app on iTunes in 68 countries, as well as the best-selling paid app of all time.

Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He’s the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator, and shuns focus groups: “As long as I can enjoy something, other people can enjoy it, too.”

If anybody has more info about this please let me know ! As it is, I really don't know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it's an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called "Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari", but I haven't found anything about that either. What's left of the manual was just rubberbanded to the cartridge.

There are 22 games based on The Simpsons. 22. That’s a lot, even by video game standards. By comparison, the long running South Park has had only four video game adaptations and the juggernaut Family Guy has had one. And explaining away the difference by claiming the latter franchises don’t have the same marketability or commercial base as The Simpsons is easily dismissed when you look at the sales of DVDs, posters, toys, t-shirts, and other goods licensed by the shows.

If tl;dr is dying & longform is winning (http://bit.ly/aTDy7f), I'd welcome more articles interesting/attractive as this http://es.pn/9crCtm

Many of the iPhone games I’ve played include achievements as well, and they certainly make you look at a game differently: This time when I play, I’ll go as fast as possible to get a "shortest time" achievement. And then I’ll play it slowly to make sure I get all the coins for another achievement. Next I’ll work on killing all the bad guys. Usually the achievements are set up so that there’s no way you can get all of them your first time through -- they require different types of gameplay and strategy, many of which won’t actually move you toward the actual goal of the game.

There were no tools to speak of so everything was entered as numbers in the assembler/editor. Later on I turned the numbers for command codes into macros to make entering and reading the sequences of notes a little easier but that’s as sophisticated as it got. I worked out tunes on a little Yamaha keyboard and typed in the pitches and durations. Often I’d work out timings on some squared graph paper, mostly by trial and error.”

"Jason Rohrer's solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love."