Game editors

In film and television there is a role largely unrepresented by an analogous one in video games. There are probably many, but I’m going to talk about one specifically, the editor.

Why I love the Wii.

So I confess, I do not own a Wii.  I have rarely played a Wii.  In fact, I hope to rarely play a Wii, but I can not help but love them (it). 

Designing a board game

What drives someone to create a board game?  When there’s so many awesome video games out there and so many things you can do with pixels and polygons, why craft a game with a flat piece of cardboard and some boring six sided dice?  Well, I want to.  So what’s driving me?  Board games are the origin of multiplayer gaming.  They hold the dark secrets of what makes an awesome online game.  Risk, monopoly, ticket to ride, setlers of katan, twilight imperium, scrabble would be nothing without the people sitting across the table from you.  As much fun as rockband is (and it’s a lot of fun), it doesn’t have nearly the staying power of some of the previously mentioned board games.  Each of those games has amazing ideas locked away inside the design.  Even dice have a magic about them, and cards a mystique.  

Ninjas versus Robots

My original title for this post was ‘Experience versus Mechanics’ but that was too mechanical. So to run with the metaphor, Ninja’s were people. They had lives, desires and emotions like you or I. Most robots, don’t. Most Robots can do the job of Ninjas but it won’t mean anything to them. Ninja’s are awesome because they can do all sorts of sneaking, killing and martial arts. Robots are cool because they don’t die while performing any given task we give them. They don’t die because they aren’t human.

Flash games versus ‘big’ games

A game director that I once studied told me that he really no longer looks at many large blockbuster titles but rather trolls small flash games for interesting ideas. He showed me a few and I’d like to share them:

http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/RPG/index.html

This one is interesting. What I took from this was how to have the simplest interaction with what makes something ‘fun’ at its core. Try it, see what you think.