I have a new crusade. Can’t we make more boring games? Or rather, since we have plenty boring-gameplay games already, and plenty boring-story games already, can’t we make more games that are boring to look at? This week I’ve been alternating between Eternal Sonata, which is opulent in colour, detail, variety and the number of irrelevant little translucent things floating around at any one time, and The Fool’s Errand, which is, well - see for yourselves:

Which one has made the strongest visual impression on me? Fool’s Errand, no doubt. For those of you who aren’t, as I wasn’t, up on your late ’80s Mac puzzle games, The Fool’s Errand is a tarot-inspired precursor to games like the Professor Layton series. An over-arching story leads you from self-contained puzzle to self-contained puzzle, testing your memory, visual acuity, anagram instincts, logic skills and wretched, dogged persistence (unless you happen to like word searches). You can download it, and the executor needed to run it here, and I heartily recommend that you do. Not least because the graphical choices made out of necessity at the time mean it now looks both modern and timeless, which I swear isn’t a contradiction.

It’s got me thinking, though, about why there aren’t more monochrome games. Why were we so quick to leave black and white behind as we moved on from Pong and Spacewar!, and so quick to assume that these 15, 52, 512 or 16.7 million new colours were necessities not possibilities? Why, other than the small consideration of it being certain commercial suicide, did so few designers chose to keep things monotonous? Why can’t I think of a single voluntarily black-and-white game, from the last ten years, since my best candidate, Vib Ribbon, turns out to have a little hint of pastel indulgence in its scoring display.

However, to my delight, there’s a resurgence, led by those reliably awesome indiekids (even if they’re indiekids who’ve since been hired by the biggest game company in the world) behind Echochrome and Switch:

Beautiful both. So that’s my new crusade: more black and white games. From now on, I spurn the false god that is colour and pledge my heart and my thumbs to my new messiah, monotony. Until, that is, someone goes and spoils it all by sending me a poster of Okami. Swoon.

I’ve just finished reading Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, a very good book I can’t in clear conscience recommend to you, because it is, without doubt, the least dramatic novel I’ve ever read. In the course of its 500+ pages fundamentally nothing happens. Our hero goes to school, which he likes; he goes to university, which he likes; he goes to a monastery, which he likes; he goes to another monastery, which is also likes; he gets a job, which he likes; and he makes a decision, which he has no cause to regret. In between, he has interminably genteel, articulate conversations with other genteel, articulate people, whom he likes and who like him. Somehow, along the way, it manages to be an extraordinary and unflinching exploration of the nature of love, authority, regret, responsibility, religion, knowledge, aging, nature, civilisation, war, individuality, fatherhood, history, friendship, childhood, society, music, philosophy and integrity, which is probably why it won Hesse the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, what the hell, I’m going to recommend it to you anyway.

And that’s partly because, as the title reveals, it’s all about a game. Who knew there was a Nobel-winning cornerstone of heavyweight Germanic literature all about games? Nor is it just about a game, it’s about a time in the near future when gaming has become the highest expression of scholarship, creativity and intellectual refinement. From our perspective, as games take their first fledgling steps towards being seen as a credible creative outlet, it’s an extraordinarily remote concept. All the more extraordinary then for Hesse, writing in 1943 about the 25th century, to see a time when playing could be viewed as the finest of our arts. Not least since, in the nine years it took him to complete the book, the upheavals underway in Germany and the world must have been continually reshaping his perceptions of how bleak our future might be.

Quite what the Glass Bead Game is is never fully explained in the book. It’s described by the narrator as being based on ‘a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts…and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.’ Lofty stuff, but its genesis sounds spookily close to something we already have, something that was invented by a game-maker. The Game’s roots were in a music student pastime of calling out shorthands for motifs of classic compositions, which other students would have to answer with continuations or improvisations. Eventually, to facilitate this, someone constructed ‘a frame, modelled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes and colours. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes.’ Sound familiar? It should if you’ve encountered the Tenori-On, the totally abstract electronic instrument based around a grid of light-beads, invented by the designer of Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai.

We are, of course, a long way off a time when devising or playing games could (or indeed should) be seen as intellectually challenging, creatively stimulating and spritually satisfying as the Glass Bead Game is portrayed as being. And, indeed, the heart of Hesse’s book is a debate about whether or not something so esoteric and abstracted can ever make a meaningful contribution to human life. But it’s interesting to imagine where we might end up if we’ve already taken the first steps towards Hesse’s future, not least thanks to the Tenori-On. A few brave souls have even tried to create working prototypes of the Glass Bead Game - the most playable of which is here - albeit in a form which is a long way from the calligraphy-and-meditation based displays which are described as forming the height of the game’s evolution. And if you’re still not convinced that Hesse might have been ahead of his time on foreseeing the future of gaming culture, consider this: what are the players of his Glass Bead Game known as? ‘Lusers’. For real, just like that, thanks to a corruption of the Latin. How’s that for futurecasting?

Thanks to having The Best Job In The World, I get to spend a fair bit of time brainstorming game pitches. These, I’ve noticed, fall into three categories. By far the most popular is the hybrid. ‘It’s Halo meets Cooking Mama!’ someone will declare, or reveal a sheaf of sketches demonstrating how Sid Meier’s Pirates! can be modded to work with the Wii Fit balance board. My experience of these is that the dumber the hybrids initially sound, the more fruitful the the design direction tends to be in the long run. Last week I sat in a room while someone explained a new project as ‘Mario Kart meets the single game in the entire world you’d think most unlikely to ever meet Mario Kart ever‘. I can’t tell you what that game was, because it’ll blow the team’s idea (feel free to barrage the comments with guesses, though), but I did have to grind the entire meeting to a point to vent my baffled scepticism. Three minutes later I was all smiles and nods. Obviously!

Then there is the blank sheet of paper. The actually new idea. These don’t come around nearly so often, and when they do they are brilliant and scary and hard. That initial blank sheet of paper soon becomes hundreds of pages of dense design doc, denied the pithy shorthands that more derivative ideas can take advantage of. Real, proper thinking has to be done. Imaginations are audibly stretched. Getting to be involved in projects like these is always a privilege but it’s a tiring, challenging and not infrequently demoralising one: actually new ideas have a scarily high failure rate.

But then there’s the anti-game. The deceptively simple process of taking an existing game and flipping its ideas - its rulesets, its assumptions, its goals, its resources and restrictions - and finding something new. I have one of those on my desk at the moment, which takes a gaming classic and adds one bit of red pen to the core design idea. And that little bit of red pen changes everything - it’s like in Saramago’s The History of the Siege Of Lisbon, where a proof-reader impulsively inserts a ‘not’ into a sentence in a history book and inadvertently remakes the entire world. I love working on anti-games; it turns game design into a game in itself, as the thought-experiment unravels and you have to jump ahead anticipating and extrapolating the consequences of that initial reversal.

Still not convinced? Then let me bring you today’s favourite anti-game. Yesterday I sent you off to Burn The Rope. Today, I invite you to solve a Fruit Mystery (sound required for both). It does exactly the opposite thing to YHTBTR, in exactly the opposite way, and yet made me exactly the same kind of happy, exactly as much. Good times, good times.

I’m a juror for Indiecade, a roving festival which celebrates, promotes and rewards independent games and their designers, which means I’ve been horribly remiss in not publicising the call for submissions for their 2008 tour. If you’re a game-maker who isn’t funded by a major, ESA-member publisher you have until April 11th to check out Indiecade’s exceptionally hospitable eligibility criteria and get your game submitted. And if you’re not a game-maker, but you’ve spotted something of late which you think deserves to be paraded round the world and showered in glitter, then lose no time in firing off an email to its creators encouraging them to get involved. I’ll be doing just that to Kian, who made the epically satisfying You Have To Burn The Rope, which if you haven’t played, you should at once. Me? I’m off to watch a video.

My GDC swag this year consists of: 2 USB memory sticks, 1 bruised spine, 6000 air miles, dozens of business cards, a 3-figure mobile phone bill and hundreds of un-answered emails. So, apologies if you’re waiting for me to get back to you - I’m catching up, I promise. In the meantime, as literally several of you have requested, here’s the powerpoint (10 meg, sorry) for my ‘Treat Me Like A Lover’ session. I’m not sure how much sense the slides will make on their own, so I’m working on a transcript, which I’ll post up here when it’s done. Hopefully GDCRadio will be up soon, so you can download it there, in the highly unlikely event you want to spend $8 on hearing me be smutty about Advance Wars. Cheers to everyone who turned out at the painful hour of 9am Friday to hear me rant, and thanks for all the kind comments after.

How many things have you named? A dog and a couple of rats or hamsters, maybe. Perhaps your car. Hopefully no parts of your anatomy. And that’s usually about it.

But think again. Dozens of RPG heroes. Hundreds of Pokémon. Squads of worms, phalanxes of chaos soldiers – heroes, pets, sidekicks, nemeses. Gamers have more experience naming things than all the world’s entymologists, rabbit breeders and orphanage mistresses put together.

So, the chances are you’ve been through all the systems. System one is usually naming everything after your friends and family. System two is usually naming things after parts of your anatomy, just to see if you can. System three is when you start to get cute, reckoning that it’s worth going through the entire game with a character called ‘Cancer’, just for the moment when ‘You’ve been killed by…’ pops up on your mate’s screen and all the politically correct people in the room heads explode. Stage four is when creative fatigue starts to kick in, and you start sticking with the defaults - not least because checking GameFAQs is a ruinous bore when you can’t remember whether your SpottleBrink was originally Balthier or Basch. Stage five is when you start devising your own systems, naming things alphabetically, or theming them by character class. Stage six is when you start categorising all your different naming systems, all the better to cross-reference.

There’s no doubt that getting it wrong can ruin a game – indeed, the better the game the more ruinous the introduction of a goofy character name can be. And in some games taking over naming duties feels almost sacriligeous. I’ve shared Zelda carts where everyone was so determined to be purist that one save had to be ‘Link’, one ‘LINK’ and one ‘link’.

But after decades of finding names for dinosaur hunters, FOmarls, space pirates and chewnicorns, here’s my question. Are gamers better or worse at naming their kids than normal people? Does our experience pay off, now that we’ve got all the dumb names out of our systems, and have learned the hard way how being kooky and original starts to pall after 300 hours? Or are we over-confident, straying from the ‘A-Z of Baby Names That Grandparents Will Know How To Spell’. Will we give rise to a generation of Sarias and Dantes and Bastilas who’ll never forgive us? And if we do, will they rebel by calling all their Pokémon things like David, John, Mary and Ann?

Happy Christmas? Hope so. Perhaps you ate turkey, watched Doctor Who, and fell asleep in front of the fire. Perhaps you had beef teriyaki, played squash and stayed up late stargazing. Either way, there’s an above average chance you did something that absolute baffles me: played a board game.

I loathe board games, but my defenses are down at Christmas. There’s a roomful of people, each with a bellyful of wine and warmth. Telly seems antisocial, but something must be done if you’re all to avoid dozing off. And someone has a big new box, full of cards and counters and dice and totems and it really does seem like a good idea. This year it was Top Gear: Race The Stig. It seems to have sold out almost everywhere, which is awfully depressing.

Now, even I agree that board games have their merits, one of which is that unlike many Christmas gifts, getting them going doesn’t start with vexations like ‘has anyone got three AAA batteries?’ Should you wish to race The Stig, however, that’s exactly what you’ll need. Instead of dice it has something that looks a little like an executive electronic desk barometer from the 1994 Innovations Catalogue. This controls the game, which consists of you moving your little Stig helmet round the board in a mechanised version of top trumps. As you play you accumulate money, which allows you to upgrade your capabilities (top speed, 0-60, etc). Each time you press the desk barometer, it tells you The Stig’s notional rating in that category. If yours is better you move on six spaces, if it’s worse, you move on one.

Almost everything about the game is shockingly broken. It’s called ‘Race The Stig’, but there is no Stig, and you’re only racing each other. The conceit that represents your upgrade in each category is that you’re buying a better car, but there’s no meaning or advantage to these - all that matters is that you’ve got a level 4 and the desk barometer is currently saying that The Stig has a level 3. There are chance cards, but the pile is so thick, and the number of occasions they are called into use so few, that the tactical parings offered (do you buy an ‘extra fuel tank’ card, to protect against the possibility of getting hit with a ‘you’ve run out of fuel’ card later on?) are totally irrelevant. The game calls for players to continually run other players off the board, for one or more turns, but there is no way to keep track of how many turns players have missed, or of where they were on the board before they got booted off.

I appreciate Race The Stig is not selling to discerning table-toppers. But, much as with videogames, that excuse makes no sense to me. The group of people I was playing with (not least thanks to those winey bellies) were far more in need of a bullet-proof, crystal clear, perfectly balanced play experience than a batch of hardened pros used to wrangled complex games into satisfying submission. Indeed, I tend to find that almost everything I know and understand about videogames applies to board games, which serves to highlight how closely related they are, and reveal the big conundrum I still don’t understand.

Why do I hate board games if I love videogames? They are, functionally, the same thing. Many videogames that I adore are just automated board games. I once spent an entire day proving that you could play Disgaea with nothing more technical than a handful of dice and a shelf of reference books. Admittedly, each move of each character required something like 134 separate calculations, but it could be done by someone with +72 Patience (and possible a stackable Mental Arithmetic bonus). And while Halo, Gradius, Virtua Fighter or Project Gotham may not have board game cousins, it’s obvious that most strategy games, RPGs and many puzzlers are just virtual boxes full of cards and counters, dice and totems. If I love Advance Wars on my GBA - even Dice Wars on my browser - why does my blood run cold when I meet them in the real world?

So these are the questions that I’m left with. Why are so many board games, especially ‘casual’ board games, so dreadful? Are bad board games worse than bad videogames? What is the alchemy that occurs when you turn one into the other? Is it just that videogames are faster than board games? Am I really so much of a savage that I’m drawn purely to the flashing lights and colours? Is the problem that board games are fundamentally social and I am fundamentally not? And can anyone suggest something we can play next year that won’t make my blood boil? And don’t say Wii Sports, or you’re off my Christmas list for good.

I have a new obsession. I intend to be the first person in the world to exhaustively catalogue all the games in the world you can play while doing what you’re doing in the game. Here’s my complete list so far:

- Eating chocolate while playing Chocolate Castle*.

I had a genuine moment of meta-existentialism as I glanced away from the game to rearrange my chunks (a 3-brick and a 2-brick of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, if you must know. I’m not proud), and then scarfed them, leaving only crumbs. The world, sadly, did not then erupt in a glorious shower of 16-bit chip-tune victory music, but I still felt like I’d poked my very own tear in the fabric of reality.

That’s pretty much it, so far. If I was a bit more adventurous I might try to emulate Randall Munroe and take up double-frontside-360ing, but I’m probably marginally worse at Tony Hawk’s than I would be at skate-boarding and might well break my nose on my DS. Does hunching over a laptop in a darkened room at 3 in the morning to play Uplink count? Or would I have to wait till 2010 for that to make the list? Are there train drivers who sneak one-handed goes on Densha-de-Go to while away long straights?

As you can seem this isn’t going to be easy, so I need your help. Both in suggestions for additions to the list, and for a name for the whole damn idea. It’s like how we need a word for words when the word itself is an example of the thing that it means - like how ‘portmanteau‘ is a portmanteau word in its own right. And, while you’re at it, I’d be equally happy to receive additions to my long-floundering list of homographic homophonic autanonyms - T-rex explains just what those are better than I ever could here. So far I’ve got cleave, dust, fast, several, overlook, sanction and quite. And yes, I know how many of those are highly debatable.

Basically, what I really need is someone to write me a Pokemon clone, where the Pokemon are actually the complete contents of the OED, and I could hunt for the word for playing a game while doing the same thing in real life while playing a game about hunting for words, and then I could add that game to the list, right under playing Chocolate Castle, and then world would explode and we’d never have to talk about it again.

* Thanks to Simon Carless’ reminder. It is an utter delight - not quite as powerfully happy-making as Peggle, but close.

I admit it: I like sums. My desk is covered in bits of paper covered in scrawled estimates of tick rates, mana effiencies and crit stats. Actual maths has always daunted me, but sums? Sums are comfort food for your brain. Soothing, repetitive, reassuring - it’s really just a different kind of doodling, except when someone walks in on you, they apologise anxiously and walk away impressed with your industry. My doodles have never impressed anyone.

So what could be better than sums? Sums in games, of course. You may have spent your summer enslaved to Plupon, or already be wrestling with Add ‘Em Up, in which case you don’t need me to tell you how hypnotic adding up can be. But if you’re yet to fall under their sway, or are looking for a new numerological overlord, then may I point you to Chain Factor? What at first sight is yet another block-dropper is actually a rather subtle puzzler, asking you to match the digits on each disc with the number of discs in each row or column. All your usual strategies are completely irrelevant here, so switch off your Tetris/Puzzle Fighter/Baku Baku instincts and prepare to feel the blood flowing to entirely new bits of your brain. The only tactic I’ve definitely sussed so far is to use the ‘1′ discs to hammer away at exposed grays at the tops of towers. For some reason this reminds me very strongly of smashing eggs on the tops of bald people’s heads.

It’s rare to find a free Flash game this good, this fresh, and this polished - please do have the sound on when you play. And that seems to be due in no small part to the vehement passion of its developers, as revealed in the game’s FAQ:

The games industry is poised on the brink of a profound transformation. Games have the potential to be the most powerful artform ever invented, an unparalleled medium for the exploration of dynamic interactive systems and the expression of complex emotional, social, and political ideas.

But the creative power of games is being held hostage by the conservative forces of the marketplace. For years, the mainstream games industry has fed us a steady stream of lowest-common-denominator drivel: brightly colored mascots scampering around childish fantasy lands; hyper-violent, testosterone-soaked war simulators; vacuous, marketing-driven movie spin-offs; and the endless grind of mindless, massively-multiplayer treadmills.

Chain Factor offers an alternative: an independent game designed outside the traditional channels of development and distribution and driven by a singular vision: put the power back into the hands of the players and let them create the game they want to play.

Stirring stuff. But, turns out after some proxy Googling (thanks, B!) that this post should really be called Playing by the Numb3rs, because Chain Factor is actually part of an ARG spawned from CBS’s maths-detectives show of the same name. A recent episode, Primacy, centered on a fictional ARG, and a range of tip-offs and related adverts have followed in its wake. Play long enough, and anomalous things start happening. I won’t spoil it, just in case you want to follow the experience for yourself, but there seems to be a wiki growing up here, if you enjoy the meta-game of watching everyone else play more than playing yourself.

It’s almost a disappointment to discover that it’s corporate-fueled, rather than the work of plucky indies, but then you realise that the developer’s call to arms, rather than being empty invective (or deliberately tongue-in-ARG play-acting), it’s probably a very fair point. Under normal circumstances, Chain Factor would be an unusually good, unusually polished Flash freebie, struggling to get noticed and barely making money. As it is, it’s unusually good, unusually polished, finding a wide audience and paid cash-on-the-barrelhead by CBS. It may not be quite the process you imagined when you read ‘an independent game designed outside the traditional channels of development and distribution and driven by a singular vision’, but you have to admit it qualifies on all fronts. I look forward to some interesting developer interviews once all the alternate reality cats are out of the game bag.

Come with me down memory lane. Remember Soda Play’s Constructor? That nifty springs-and-sprockets creature-machine builder from a few years ago, that made you 100 times more excited than Meccano (I did warn you about memory lane), but ultimately crushed you with the revelation of your own ineptitude, impatience and lack of creativity? Well, Soda Play are back, only now instead of creature-machines, you can make games.

Newtoon is a Java tool which lets you make little 2D physics-based games entirely out of balls and springs. You can fix balls to the play-field or leave them to bounce free, and springs can be adjusted for tension. This being Soda Play, you can tweak things like gravity and friction. So far, so familiar, right? But the game bit comes in through some devilishly simple grammar. Each ball can, if you so chose, be designated a goal, hazard, or player token. The token can be controlled by the arrow keys: touch a hazard and it’s game over, touch the goal and it’s a win. And suddenly, all of 90 seconds later, you’ve made your first game.

I’ve done my time with idiot-proof game creators - with RPG Maker, and Dark Basic and various modding tools, but am usually defeated by the same failings that Meccano used to reveal. With Newtoon, it will take an actual act of an actual god to prevent you from making a game. It’s the Wario Ware of game-makers, something you really can play with for 2 minutes and find rewarding.

And, actually, it really is the Wario Ware of game-makers, as you can collect your own and other creators’ mini-games into ’stacks’ which will remind you very much of that very game. Much in the manner of Constructor all your games can be saved to Soda Play’s website. I also seem to remember something in the beta about being able to download game stacks to play on your mobile phone, but no sign of that at present.

Basically, if you’ve got an hour to kill between now and lunch, you can use Newtoon to become an experienced game-maker. Just think how much more authority your forum posts will have when you can preface them with ‘In the games that I’ve made…’! Or, if you’re already an experienced game-maker, just think how gratifying it will be watching your friends, family and foes discover that it isn’t as easy as it looks, even when it looks this easy.

And, if that’s given you the taste for drawing things in 2D and watching physics happen to them, then I’d recommend spending the afternoon playing Crayon Physics. And then writing mass petitions to Nintendo to get it a DS deal.