94 posts tagged with games.
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Everybody Wins, the greatest board games ever made
I've done a book. This one's called Everybody Wins and it's an overview of the rise of modern board games over the last four decades, using the German 'Spiel des Jahres' game of the year award as a lens. The publishers have done a gorgeous on it, and it's released in the UK today, and then in March in the USA. Ebook out now, audiobook to follow. It's a big, chunky coffee-table tome and I'm really pleased with the way it's come out, both as a piece of history and as reviews of 44 very different award-winning titles, ranging from household names to mostly forgotten footnotes. [more inside]
You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
My book about gamification is out! You've Been Played (Bookshop.org, Goodreads) examines how points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life as tools for profit and coercion. It’s a critique of gamification, sure – but by an actual game designer, games journalist, and former neuroscientist. And it goes far beyond the usual suspects like Fitbit and Duolingo to look at the historical roots of gamification. Foucault, Lewis Mumford, Skinner, medieval indulgences, Taylorism, ARGs – this book has it all! Reviews, talks, and excerpts inside... [more inside]
Early Collaborative Games of Fantasy and Imagination
A few months ago, I posted a rough translation of the rules to a collaborative fairy tale storytelling game more than 200 years old. I've now put that onto a Neocities site with many additional translations: a total of 5 variants of the same game re-published many times between 1801 and 1867, several variants of a game the same age that involves role-playing, and several variants of even older poetry and nonsense games related to the Surrealist game "Exquisite Corpse." There are also pages and translations explaining the history of the games' penalty phase, offering advice on running demos of the storytelling game especially using motifs from the earliest "secondary world" fantasy novel, and possible round-robin storytelling from the 1600s-1700s, as well as links to many additional sources for parlor games from 1551 to 1899.
Penga, a penguin physics game
I recently integrated Planck.js into a client's product and wanted to reuse that knowledge to make a fun game, so I picked an idea and tweeted along as I refined & built it. [more inside]
BOKEH game
I wanted to make a simple webgame similar to those old Flash ones where you eat smaller fish & avoid bigger ones. A 'budget' of 1-1.5 days seemed sensible and I tweeted updates while building it.
Set Side B
I thought to myself, what was the least zeitgeisty thing we could create in this year of our frog 2022? As a result, me and a couple of friends have started a new gaming blog, called Set Side B! I was inspired by the final loss of the archives of old GameSetWatch, where I wrote @Play long ago. You can still find it on the Wayback Machine, but even so, that site hasn't been updated since 2011 anyway. Set Side B is our effort to do something about its loss. I will be writing on a bunch of topics there, both shortly and longly, but mostly shortly. Including roguelikes. Please enjoy our overbearing randomess!
A narrative game system over 200 years old: "The Impromptu Tale"
I worked up a rough translation of one of the collaborative story-telling games linked in this post: Pre-Surrealist Games. It's called "The Impromptu Tale," and there's a lot to it that modern tabletop gamers may find familiar.
You think you're addicted to Spelling Bee?
Here's my NYT Spelling Bee inspired game, Spellbound. Besides coding it up, I created all the word lists. Compared to the NYT, there is more food and plants, fewer chemicals and fish, and no words that would embarrass anyone playing with their children. Free, no ads, no shared data, just for fun. And you don't need a subscription to the NYT to play it.
DNDle - Wordle, but you're picking stats to guess D&D monsters
It feels like there's a Wordle clone for everybody nowadays. But I decided to go in a slightly different direction when I made DNDle, a game in which you try to guess the Dungeons & Dragons "monster of the day" by assigning values to its attributes and being told where you've got them right. [more inside]
So I made a Wordle clone (with some extra features)
I have been playing Wordle for a few months with friends from a Discord, and I really liked it, but I felt it had some shortcomings that I wanted to address. So, I made a Wordle clone. It's mostly the same as Wordle but [more inside]
Saturday Afternoon Ikea Trip Simulator
Saturday Afternoon Ikea Trip Simulator is a (one joke) text adventure designed to simulate the experience of going to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon (other times of day and/or days of the week are available upon request). [more inside]
Armoured Commander II
I just released my game, Armoured Commander II, out of Steam Early Access. It's a sequel to a project I posted here nearly six years ago now. The game is a turn-based roguelike where you command a tank and its crew in world war II. Combat is brutal and unforgiving, and survival is the goal. [more inside]
Rootin' Tootin' Cowboy Shootin'
A cowboy shooting game!
Made mostly by my 13-year old son, with programming & useability support from me. [more inside]
Chess Patch Notes
The history of chess rule changes presented as if they were patch notes from a Blizzard game like Overwatch. Seems fitting with the recent AlphaZero work exploring chess variants and the joining of forces between the gaming and chess streamer communities. Some background here.
Mixolumia
Mixolumia is an entrancing, musical block-clearing puzzler released on itch just the other day. I wound up documenting the 18-month development process in a big twitter thread (also in twitter moment format) that folks have found interesting. Besides bringing a fresh twist to the puzzler genre, Mixolumia also has a dynamic soundtrack (by Josie Brechner and myself) that responds and evolves as you play. The cool thing is that the music system is open to players to create and share their own songs/sound packs. There's documentation on how to do that if you're interested in reading how it works. The game comes with a wide range of color palettes and players can customize and create their own as well. [more inside]
Fifteen Monsters All In A Row
Fifteen Monsters All In A Row is a short text adventure/twine game (which should work in any browser), where you have to confront fifteen monsters (in a row), which I made for/with my five year old niece and two year old nephew, who designed the monsters, and wrote some of the stories. The game contains 15 monsters (all in a row), several secret monsters (occasionally in a row), multiple solutions to every problem (almost), some exciting stories (occasionally), at least two jokes, and even a super secret special ending. [more inside]
Ultimate Quarantine House Selection!
A little toy that generates fresh instances of the "Pick Your Quarantine House" meme/game. Potential roommates are drawn from a pool of 3000+ celebrities and historical figures. [more inside]
a Twine game about the Queen under the Hill
"Eyes of Tree" is a hypertext game about the price you pay for loving the fairy queen. [more inside]
Hit the High Notes singing game
Sing to your browser and see how high you can go compared with 27 famous singers. I've been working on this for a while, struggling to get robust cross-browser pitch detection, then eventually found a combination of hacks/libraries that does the trick.
VOLE.wtf - malevole reborn
Way back in 2002 I launched malevole.com, a site for my daftest creative projects, and tried reaching all the cool bloggers with a $10 MeFi text ad featuring an ASCII vole <",_,)~ This seemingly worked, and the site had a few viral hits, but by the end of 2004 I was too caught up in my day job and let it rot. Nearly 15 years later, I've brought it back with a completely new look, some revamped old stuff, and lots more lined up. [more inside]
Would you like to play a season of Eat Poop You Cat over email?
Eat Poop You Cat aka Telephone Pictionary (BoardGameGeek, MeFi, and this isn't the first MeFi Project) is a game of making art -- often badly -- and writing. Assuming 8 people play a season, each player's responsibility will be for 4 artworks and 4 sentences over the course of about 12 days. Each completed game is posted to Tumblr and sent to a group email for communal reaction.
- Some past favorites:
- #013F: “Up from his mouth rose a volcano steaming with blistered robots fighting off evil bats."
- #010B: “The sun ws setting over the machines as they completed their work enslaving humanity and only one robot was remorseful as he tried and failed to paint a landscape of the scene in front of him."
Make money. Rip off hard-working people. Earn cool stuff for your desk.
From the team that brought you Payback and Stax comes our newest financial literacy game: Shady Sam. [more inside]
Telephone Pictionary, Correspondence Edition
A web page featuring a super-basic set of printable instructions I've created to play Telephone Pictionary (a.k.a. Eat Poop You Cat) via snail-mail. Scans of completed correspondence games included. (Direct link to instructions on Google Docs)
fcc-git-nomic: A game of Nomic played via Github
I learned about Nomic games a few days ago, so made one to help new developers learn the basics of Github pull request workflows so they can contribute to open source projects. It's aimed particularly at the freeCodeCamp community, but all are welcome. Even if you are a seasoned Github contributor, you are welcome to play, too, because Nomic is an extremely fun game!
Roguelike Celebration, October 6-7 2018 in San Francisco (third annual!)
A bunch of my friends and I like roguelike computer games, and we keep organizing an annual community conference for players and developers of games in this beloved genre (such as Nethack) and games they've influenced (such as Dwarf Fortress). If you're into this kind of thing (or curious about it) and nearby, please join us for some neat and thoughtful talks about roguelikes, retrocomputing, procedural generation, and game design!
Pierre Menard's The Asteroids
Perhaps the most significant game of our time [more inside]
256 Farben: The Game
After a visit to SFMOMA, I was inspired to turn German abstract artist Gerhard Richter's "Colour Charts" into a block-breaker game. [more inside]
EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER
I'm making a serial game that's half visual novel, half mech brawler, about gay disasters beating up neonazis in an alternate universe version of the American Southwest! Here are the first two episodes.
Will Not Let Me Go
Dallas, Texas. 1996. Fred Strickland has Alzheimer’s. An interactive story about memory, loss, and love.
Numbers
What do the numbers coming from the shortwave station mean? Who is behind it? Who wants to help you find out... and who will stop you at any cost?
A Twine game about numbers stations, made for Global Game Jam 2018, with music by Zarkonnen.
This Room Will Kill You
This is my first game -- a surreal, story-driven RPG with horror elements -- inspired by The Stanley Parable, Yume Nikki, and all the wonderful 90s jRPGs that I grew up with. [more inside]
Haunted Floating Eye - A Lair Defense Game
Haunted Floating Eye is my newest pay-what-you-can ($0 is fine!) game, in active development. You play a magical floating eye monster who has decided to take up residence in a naturally occurring cliff face, as your kind often do. [more inside]
What The $!#&@! Do They Need Now?
A point-and-click game about the recent US Travel/Muslim Bans, made as part of Indie Train Jam 2017. [more inside]
The Throwin' Rocks at Fish Roleplayin' Game
A role playing game like no other. [more inside]
Liberation Circuit - Rogue AI Simulator
A free (GPL) real-time-strategy/programming game where you must escape from a hostile computer system. A screenshot; the trailer (youtube); some more gameplay (also youtube). For Windows (the executable is available from the github release page at the main link) and can also be built on any system supported by Allegro (Linux etc.). [more inside]
Civic Games Contest
Announcing the 2017 Civic Games contest, a design competition for analog games that seek to promote the understanding and/or practice of good citizenship! [more inside]
odlaw.
Odlaw (as seen on Waypoint) is a two-player stealth game about visual distraction. You and your opponent must seek each other out in a field of one hundred fake players, but with such a populated space, the first challenge is to find yourself. There's also a black-and-white mode for folks who have trouble discerning color.
The Seers Catalogue
An multimedia storybook and its inscrutable magazine, The Seers Catalogue is a world of weights and measures, strange encounters and necromantic cabals, where the key to all secrets is an obtuse and enthralling magazine. [more inside]
Roguelike Celebration, September 17 in San Francisco
Do you like roguelike computer games (such as Nethack) or games they've influenced (such as Diablo, Dwarf Fortress, and Spelunky)? (See also: past Metafilter posts.) Roguelikes are a fascinating genre of game that started in 1980, with both old and new ones still actively developed. My friends and I are organizing a one-day conference about roguelike games on September 17, 2016 in downtown San Francisco! Get a ticket here. [more inside]
Music, Retro-gaming and Elsewhat Blog
VGR2016 is an ongoing 5-way blog envisioned as half a way for a bunch of UK-based friends to keep up, half an excuse to replay and review old video games, and half World Domination. The third half is the charm. We also feature both Music and Opinions.
Big Bad Bosses - Power Overwhelming
Watch out! Listen! BAD GUYS FROM VIDEO GAMES somehow joined up to form a 90s boy band. I just wrote, composed, arranged, and produced their entire debut album. In Big Bad Bosses - Power Overwhelming, caricatures of Bowser, Ganondorf, Sephiroth, and Dr. Eggman sing honest, soulful songs about how even their terrifying fury can't protect them from the big questions in life. It's been #1 on the iTunes comedy charts for a week, and I couldn't wait to post it to MeFi Projects! [more inside]
Otherfoot: Only Pen and Paper Required
I put together a website dedicated to my all-time favorite game, Otherfoot (mentioned previously in my 2006 FPP about ink-and-paper games). Otherfoot is a card game, played with a newly-created homemade deck every time. Gameplay is similar to Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity (pre-dating the latter), with key differences laid out in the FAQ (and reposted below). The game concept was developed by friends of my brother, and I've derived a lot of joy from playing Otherfoot with old and new friends for more than 10 years. [more inside]
ifTree
My attempt at putting together a very simple javaScript plugin for creating dialog trees and interactive fiction games, complete with some javaScript hooks so you can tie it into other stuff. GitHub link, examples.
Dup Bridge
An iPhone application that deals and scores duplicate bridge hands using free-to-print cards.
Massive Head Canon
Console Obscura - a retro gaming culture and history podcast
Console Obscura is a podcast dedicated to video games and the people who play them. Ephemera, nostalgia, absurdity, history, culture, arcana and trivia are all fair game. If you remember what a new power pad smelled like, or Ganon's laugh sounds like, OR If none of that rings a bell but you enjoy a group of funny children of the 80s talking trash, this podcast is for you. Game on!
Crazy Trick: Is it a clickbait headline or spam mail?
A simple quiz: Guess whether the text is from a subject in my spam folder or a news headline. Or: 21 scandalous true uncensored answers no one wants you to know, but everyone — including your future life partner — is talking about. [more inside]
DOS POP
this is DOS POP: over 40 minutes of primitive, tinny FM slime-synthesis for the discerning pop aesthete. a soundcloud mix sourced from vintage PC games, with some tasty ear candy and glitchery thrown in for good measure.
maxis trash funk, bitcrushed opera, diseasecore, swamp new age, adlib fantasia and soundblaster death jams await your miserable, yearning ears. grab some waterproof headphones and dive in.
part of the experience is not always knowing what you're hearing, so I haven't included a tracklist. available on request, though.
Octropolis
A fast-action scrolling maze game for Android, intended for tablets. Guide an octopus through a huge maze, collecting eggs and avoiding sharks. Consume "mega eggs" to attack the sharks back. Intended as a riff on classic Namco arcade maze games of the 1980s, including Pac-Man and Rally-X. [more inside]
Logs of Lag: League of Legends netlog analysis
A drag-and-drop web tool for analyzing network logs from the game League of Legends. Fast, simple, helps you understand the lag you see while playing the game. It's a simple HTML5 app built with D3.js. Screenshot, GitHub.
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