Official Interference video

Thanks to the talented Emeric Adrain, the official video for Interference is now online. Emeric shot the video at la Gaîté lyrique, where it is currently installed as part of the Play Along exhibition through mid-August.

Enjoy the shifting, swaying visuals that Emeric captured, as well as the bit-trippy soundtrack by Finnish sound artist Pastacas. Nathalie and I are very happy with the end result.

Things people say

Interference was well-received in Paris and got some great coverage along with the entire Play Along exhibition at la Gaîté lyrique.

• My favorite was this piece from the newspaper Liberation on the show, which also included a separate interview with Nathalie and myself under the delicious title, “A Cultural Form Based on Pleasure.”  (Yes, these two articles are in French.)
• The Creators Project interviewed Nathalie and I about our experience creating Interference together at the intersection of art, architecture, and game design.
• Game culture site Kill Screen wrote a small piece on the project, calling Interference “a game that makes you cheat.”
• Interference has popped up on all kinds of design blogs and tumblrs. Undoubtedly because it photographs so well. (Thanks, Nathalie!)  Here are a few samples as the project appears on Culturebox, Lustik, and Farewell Kingdom.

And a few non-Interference items:

• Game review and criticism site Play with Pixels has decided to devote regular blog posts to Metagame-based game comparisons. Here is their first one.
• The German publication Zeit carried this feature about the Metagame. See if you can translate the title: “Ein Computerspiel ohne Computer.”
• Finally, a blog post at Game-Based Learning Dev proposes a method of iterative designed based on this article I wrote for Design Research.

Recent talks

New video and audio on the web.

• Earlier this year, I appeared on a panel at the Smithsonian celebrating their landmark videogame exhibition. Here’s a video of the panel where I chat with some amazing people, including Mary Flanagan, Tracy Fullerton, Richard LeMarchand, and Colleen Macklin about games that were meaningful to each of us.
• The Australian Broadcasting Company (the other ABC) created a marvelously detailed radio show about strategy boardgame culture, in which I help provide some theoretical and historical context.
• And another video, this one of my lecture at MIT’s Sandbox Summit earlier this spring. The title of the lecture is “Games are not good for you” and it is a rant against the instrumentalization of games as learning vehicles.

Metagame Podcast

Just a quick note to recognize Jeff Rubin’s recent podcast that focuses entirely on discussions around the Metagame.

I’m listening to it as I write this post, but what I love about the podcast so far is the way that Jeff and his two competitors Adam Conover and Jared Logan immediately begin redesigning the rules. About 10 minutes in, and they have made modifications to judging, player rotation, debating time, and scoring.

The Metagame is meant to be more of a “tennis ball” than a single designed game (to use designer Charles Pratt’s term for games that encourage open play). Players always end up modifying the Metagame to suit their own needs – in this case, a version that works well as a highly entertaining podcast.

Far from “spoiling” the design of the game, this is the design of the game. And in any case, players doing things that you didn’t anticipate is the sweetest pleasure a game designer can experience.

21 short essays on game design

As part of my ongoing attempt to update my website, I’ve just added a few new pages about my game writings. These include pages on Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader, and a page with 21 essays I’ve written over the last 15 years.

It’s curious and satisfying to see all of the essays together on one web page. They range from highly practical articles about running an independent game studio to more theoretical essays on how game design can be considered a model for literacy. Many of the essays are out of print and a couple of them never actually got published, such as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure interactive narrative called No Future I wrote with Frank Lantz back in 2001.

For those interested in the genealogy of Rules of Play, you can trace the evolution of key concepts in essays like Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four naughty concepts in need of discipline and Rules, Play and Culture: Towards an Aesthetic of Games – an article I wrote with Frank that includes my first use of the term “magic circle” as well as the formal/experiential/cultural structure that became Rules of Play.

Many of the essays are very much reflections of the time in which they were written. The insurrectionary A Bill of Rights for Game Developers was written in 2005 – just as digital distribution was beginning to change everything. Do Independent Games Exist? from 2002 – published long before the rise of even the term “independent games” – still feels relevant.

Some of the essays are collaborations with former Gamelabbers – including Frank Lantz but also articles I wrote with game designer Nick Fortugno, designer/producer Catherine Herdlick, and Gamelab co-founder Peter Lee. Perhaps there really was something to that “culture of research” at Gamelab after all.

Enjoy the essays. Apologies in advance for the clunky format of some of the text.
You can find all 21 of them here.