Meaning and action are complementary principles in the gaming activity and literary form called the “quest”. So argues Jeff Howard in his recent Digital Humanities Quarterly article, “Interpretive Quests in Theory and Pedagogy“. By quest, he means a journey in search of meaning, a journey that can include goal oriented activities if it takes place in a game world. Meanings can be functional and thematic. Functional meanings have to do with game tasks and things. Thematic meanings have to do with stories, which are about people and emotions. Quests mediate between storytelling and game play only to the extent that meanings go beyond utility. He suggests how. continue reading »

Gene Endrody uses Director to make MMORPGs like Sherwood Dungeon at maidmarian.com. Using only three game servers that run the Shockwave Multiuser Server, he’s had close to 2000 simultaneous players per server. Starting out with a lot of 3D experience but no programming experience, he’s done all the development himself. He started living his dream when Director 8.5 came out, putting real-time 3D on the web within reach. Read the part one and part two of Hanford Lemoore’s interview with him to learn more about this inspiring indy game maker.

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Slamdance, best known for the Slamdance Film Festival, has established a Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. The goal of this competition is to encourage and showcase independent games. Art rather than business will be the primary focus. There are a lot of concepts among the finalists that I find very fresh and interesting. For example, there is Cultivation, a game about gardening. This may seem like it could be boring, and no doubt it would bore some gamers, but I find the description intriguing:

Cultivation is quite different from most other games. It is a social simulation, and the primary form of conflict is over land and plant resources—there is no shooting, but there are plenty of angry looks. It is also an evolution simulation. Within the world of Cultivation, you can explore a virtually infinite spectrum of different plant and gardener varieties.

All of the graphics, sounds, melodies,and other content in Cultivation are 100% procedurally generated at playtime. In other words, there are no hand-painted texture maps—instead, each object has a uniquely “grown” appearance. Every time you play, Cultivation generates fresh visuals, music, and behaviors.

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Who would have guessed that the history of Tetris was so full of intrigue and drama? In fact, Tetris has been the downfall of more than one company, ever since Alexey Pazhitnov created it in the Soviet Union in 1985, after being inspired by a pentominoes game. Torill Mortensen of Thinking with My Fingers clued me in to this history with her brief post about it on June 7.

GAM3R 7H30RY, a draft by McKenzie Wark, is another book that is being shared online before finishing and publishing it. Wark hopes to use the GAM3R 7H30RY website to foster discussion around two questions:

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Christy Dena writes in Cross-Media Entertainment that internet scavenger hunts are becoming a popular means of movie promotion on the internet, as well as a potential art form in themselves. One recent example is the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google.

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When I stumbled across Jim’s Flash Bestiary, I felt like a kid in a toy store. Jim’s got examples of circles and kaleidescopes, natural phenomena and fractals, physical simulations, oddments, mazes and labyrinths, fun with text and classic games. His classic games includes Flash implementations of Asteroids, Frogger and Pong. His physical simulations includes a Flash version of sodaplay. For each of these examples, there’s a link to download the Flash file with all the source code. Not only is Jim generous with his demos, he is also generous with his advice in the Flash Kit forums.

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Corvus Elrod wrote a very thoughtful and well-argued post regarding a debate on the difference between experiencing a story and playing a game. Much of his argument hinges on his definitions of “story” and “narrative” and the distinctions between these two terms. He also makes the point that even a static story is always really two stories, the intended story and the experienced story. I completely agree with this point. Reader participation is active, not passive, and the meaning of any story – or any text at all – is always a co-creation of author and reader. This insight makes it more problematic to posit simple comparisons and contrasts between not only static and dynamic stories, but also between stories and games.

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