For years now I’ve been interested in games as tools for creative expression.  I like games where you don’t just develop a skill, you create something as you play.  Once you have created some bit of content, it’s possible to reuse and repurpose that content; to leverage it.  There is one obvious game to talk [...]

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I often think about why people play games.  For a while I’ve been batting around a metaphor that I find useful: Junk food vs. Nutrition. Some games are simply fun.  They provide some sort of pleasure from manipulating the components or developing skill.  One of my favorite [...]

Recently I attended Global Game Jam 2009. It was interesting; I don’t have anything too urgent to report, I’ll make a full, thoughtful blog post about it later.  For now I want to talk about something else. I was thinking about the question, how does an indie game developer make money?  People have tried all [...]

For 3-7 players.  Uses a standard 52-card deck. Shuffle, deal 7 cards to each player. Players trade cards amongst themselves. After a while (time limit?) trading ends. Each player uses the cards they have to construct the highest-scoring poker hand they can. Highest hand wins. The information problem Notice I’ve said nothing about what sort [...]

As hinted at in an earlier post, I’ve created a new web-based game: NecroFodder!  It’s intended to be quick-playing but with some strategy involved as well.  Go check it out!  (It was created for the TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition.) In other news…I’ve been getting a huge number of spam comments on this blog.  Fortunately, the [...]

Recently I had an interesting insight, but I need some background to explain it. First, let’s think about games. Single player games, for now. One of the definitions of games given in Rules of Play is that game players deal with unnecessary obstacles. Imagine Super Mario Bros., for example; there are all sorts of obstacles [...]

Today I looked into learning JavaScript.  Basically it’s a weakly-typed declarative/functional language with a couple object-oriented features for good measure, much in the line of PHP or Perl.  The interesting part, though, is the “HTML DOM”, a set of objects that allows JavaScript to access and manipulate the web page it’s a part of.  I [...]

First, Greg Costikyan (yes, that Greg Costikyan) has given Aching Dreams a favorable review.  Not intense praise or accolades by any means, but for what the game is, I’m very pleased with what he said.  And there’s an interesting conversation going on in the comments, too.  Really, this is kind of an amazing feeling for [...]

So, recently I completed writing a long…well, I guess you’d call it a short story, or maybe even a chapter of a novella. And now that that’s out of the way, I can get on with doing other cool stuff. (It had sort of been weighing on my mind for a while.) I’m doing more [...]

Over in my LiveJournal I posted an idea about dividing up valuable loot between a group of people completing a “dungeon run” of some kind. It sparked some interesting discussion in the comments! I suppose I should do that sort of thing in this blog, although I’m not sure anyone even reads it…