Articles of Interest

  • Recap of the Experimental Gameplay session at GDC. I was only able to attend the first 45 minutes or so, but what I saw was really entertaining. Most interested in the first slew of (sound-centric) games… unfortunately the recap only mentions some of them. Also, I learned of Petri Purho’s blog during this session; he’s a game designer with a great sense of humor. Check out his work.
  • Recap of Clint Hocking’s GDC talk about self-exploration in games. He makes a great point about games that implicitly force you to be “very good” or “very evil” (which is pretty much all games with a moral slider). Doesn’t that arbitrarily limit the player? Doesn’t it cut out some interesting design opportunities?
  • Three Rings’ Whirled will be a web-based UGC toolbox / virtual world where people hang out and create their own minigames. I know of at least three other projects along these lines; I wonder how many hundreds are in the works that I don’t know about.
  • EA’s Neil Young talks about their new BattleCast feature (basically, other people can tune into your game session as watch along.)
  • Microsoft finally announced Games for Windows Live; aka the Live service on your PC. Most people are talking about achievements, multiplayer, etc, but I’m more excited about ways this can help foster user-generated content.

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