"Hi, I'm Notch, and this is my new game. It's going to be a space game, and it's quite ambitious!" Wah!

I did not. But then I am not an architect or spouse thereof.

"One goal of this was to figure out how much of the variance in score comes from the tile order and how much comes from the board, given that a tile order would be expected. It turns out to be about half-bag, half-board. [...] The blank is worth about 30 points to a good player. [...] The Q is a burden to whichever player receives it, effectively serving as a 5 point penalty."

I'm not playing Glitch. Much.

"Ale Trumps® features a selection of 34 of the UK's top ales and is played along the lines of other Trumps games, under the following categories: the age of the brewery, its production level, the strength of the beer, its depth of colour, its rarity and refreshment potential."

"Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither."

"Soho! is a game of skill and judgement for 2-6 players of all ages inspired by the two things for which this small, historic patch of London is famous around the globe: its pubs, and its one-way system."

"Let's Gamify The World!"<br />
<br />
No, let's not.

Excellent presentation from Playful 2010.

"Raph Koster once said he became disillusioned with games because, after working to come up with a method to universally describe them, he realized that they're all basically math. And that's yet another reason why story games are so freaking cool - they aren't. (Well, technically they are, because the universe is math, but you know what I mean.) With D&D it's pretty easy to see through the story through to the underlying math. But with some of these story games, it's the story that matters - the math just pops up on occasion in service to the story, to resolve disagreements or escalate."

"I'm not willing to accept that it's impossible to create a legitimately enjoyable game experience in the confines of the short attention span Facebook model, though. Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better. Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory. This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game."

"Over the next decade we’ll see game mechanics become ubiquitous amongst companies. Consumers will migrate in droves to companies who properly deploy game mechanics because doing business with them is more fun, rewarding and even addictive." Makes me feel slightly queasy.

"My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art."

"There were a handful of records released in the late 70′s and early 80′s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great."

"I remain convinced that _in principle_, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."

"Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not." Had to double-check the date on this. April 6th.

"Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver are sold with an included Pokéwalker, which is a pedometer that can provide neat extras in the Pokémon games. Pokéfans can put Pokémon in the device and also use it to find items along certain "routes." According to Bulbapedia, unlocking every route in the Pokéwalker can only be done by walking a minimum of 1,000 miles."

"An entire generation seems to have become used to experiences clogged with menus and text, spammed with awkward cutscenes, choked by voice acting, mangled by incongruent narrative, segmented by load times, stalled by informational messages. These elements serve to undermine the aesthetic coherence of the work -- they can dilute the magic, they can interrupt the flow, they can disrupt the basic audiovisual communication, they can break the spell."

This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."

"Some notes from the session Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 presented by Jaime Griesemer from Bungie."

"The unspoken premise of [Jesse Schell's] DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery, or Xbox "achievements" for watching the opening movie of a game (that's a real one). But people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given."

"Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy."

"Why, then, did we throw everything we'd learned out the window when it came time to design achievements? I think that's what bothered me about early Xbox Live achievements more than anything — as goals, they violated too many game design guidelines. Too many of them wouldn't make any sense as in-game goals for progressing through content."

"A player's motivation is more complex than "to have fun." Think on it closely and you'll agree – everyone plays to scratch a particular itch, and some games serve some itches better than others. While plenty of the details are complex and subjective, it's possible to divide play motivations into four different groups."

"Because we are so fixated on what the next thing might be, we hurry to get the current thing out of the way, even if that means doing the minimum required rather than playing with style. In this sense, games’ standard strategies of motivation are strangely demotivating."

Exciting!

"With Love, we’ve got a pristine world with its own complex set of rules, ripe for discovery. One of the downsides of playing a game like World of Warcraft is that everything’s been done, every problem solved, every nook explored. In Love, nearly everything needs to be worked out. If you play Love now, you’re doing the work of a pioneer."

"Writing music for games also requires a number of specialist skills compared with conventional film scoring, such as non-linear and multi-layered composition."

"What would videogaming look like if it rejected the machine as a model for play, if more games incorporated gratuitous moments of relaxation from their constant, accelerated striving? Or if more games did not treat us as employees but as autonomous co-creators?"

"This is a list of old game releases. These games were priced at nearly $50 a year ago, now probably a lot less. Why buy a new game when there are plenty of fun games out there worth renting or buying for less?"

Playful write-up from Edge.

"An experiment in crowdsourced game development."

"Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase."

"To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year. You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game."

"We’ve combined some fun things, a treasure hunt / i-spy game which you play using your mobile, which generates a list of everything you’ve seen at an event (in an end of school holiday essay style), with geotagging and analytics. Your mobile number is the tracking cookie. We call the game And I Saw...”

"Area/Code takes advantage of today's environment of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of entertainment."

"Where this is all going is that the bigger and sandboxier games get, the more it is possible to play cat and mouse with the developers - to see if they have anticipated a particular response to stimuli, or whether unexpected actions can have a positive effect on gameplay - cheating without cheating, in effect."

"An online role playing game that places the virtual world on top of the real world using the GPS inside your phone. Attack, chat and interact with your friends and anyone else around you."

"Jones said how most open city games tend to come with about 100 licensed tracks, but that they realised that most players would far rather listen to their own mp3 collection. But this is an online game. So they’ve done a deal with Last.FM to use their technology in such a brilliantly imaginative way. If you’re listening to a favourite track in your car, and drive past some other players, should they have the same track on their hard drive the game will find it, and they’ll hear it from your car as you go by. Should they not have it, the game will find a track that’s similar and play that instead." Pipped.

Oasis AR microsite with a retrogaming feel from Poke/The Flippers.

"Add the billion plus PC owners who, from time to time, leave their desks and you get a glimpse of the untapped reservoir of potential new gamblers which is the m-gambling marketplace." That sentence makes me feel a little ill.

"The world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Missions might include giving someone your favorite book, inviting a friend for drinks, or buying a friend some chocolate."

"A temporary social space that can be setup anywhere from a club night to a squatted art space. We build the ultimate retro gaming area, working with whatever space we have from single monitor setups to multiple projected screens and full size arcade machines."

"The player accumulates points by how much they stretch during gameplay. These points can be submitted online via a character called Sun to another character called Girl. Points submitted online by players to Girl will be added cumulatively, causing Girl to stretch. Beginning on Earth, Girl will stretch to the Moon, then to several other planets, each unlocking new playable environments for Boy to stretch in. The Noby Noby Boy team expects players to take between one and two weeks of cumulative play time to reach the Moon."

"Creators of socially responsible video games"

It's out! But it's PC only, which is a shame. "A 2D physics puzzle / sandbox game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics."

"Covering every current platform (PC/Mac/Linux, PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, DS, iPhone, N-gage), the 20 isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way."

Help. Me.

Urgh. Must not get sucked back in to pointless grindy game.

"Purchase and download DRM-free classic PC games."

"The [service] attracting the most buzz is "WiFi Army," a first-person shooter game currently in beta. Like a mash-up of laser tag and the parlor game Assassin, participants meet on the street (using Google Maps) and "shoot" each other with their phone cameras."

Very smart.

"Companies should create rich and immersive website experiences, drawing from some of the techniques for game design to build brand affinity and differentiate their sites."

"ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is."

"Urban game based on cameraphones and the use QR-Codes."

Now that it's done · · · · · I've begun to see the reason why we are here.

"An alliance of creative folk - game designers, coders, writers - working together to create pro bono, pro-social games."

"I don’t give a crap whether you liked Eve, or found it boring, or unplayable or anything else: what you need to understand are the principles that are at its foundations, because they’re principles that can be applied to stop MMOs becoming stale and

"Some of the more notable releases on the PS2 in 2007." So I have a PS2. What of it?

"For Each Word You Get Right, We Donate 10 Grains of Rice through the United Nations to Help End World Hunger"

"A lot of traditional IA practice doesn’t make sense anymore. Instead of directly designing an information space, you’re better off designing the rules that underly the generative construction of such spaces."

"An OverClocked ReMix Album featuring free fan arrangements from the soundtrack to Square's legendary Final Fantasy VII for the Sony Playstation."

Original source.

"Every time you hit another player in Kwari you make money. Every time you are hit by another player it costs you. Every shot counts. How much is down to the stake level you play in."

"Lest it disappear from the web completely, the PARP manifesto, as written for the PARP group in the Game Neverending."

"Last night, I finally figured it out: flickr is a MMORPG."