Upcoming Interview on With Special Guest

I'll be on With Special Guest on July 3rd at 8p Eastern. We'll talk about the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge and a bunch of other stuff. Past episodes' guests have included Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot, and Wendee Lee. Good company! Check out the show Sunday night.

» With Special Guest
» With Special Guest

Doh: Something of the Something Something

A gift from John Harper

Happy Birthday, Robot! at the Tower's All-Weekend Gaming Event

Alexander Williams shares his experience running several sessions of Happy Birthday, Robot!

"I ended up running three games of HBR in a day, twice with an eleven year old and a fourteen year old and once with an all adult group. The big take-away from that? I should never play with children because they're too violent and nasty. Also, they never needed an explanation of what a complete sentence was; adults? It took them a while to figure out that complete sentences were."

» Read the stories on his blog
» Photo: CC BY Alexander Williams

Time Between Kickstarters [Twitter]

So what do you think is an appropriate time between Kickstarters? Any of the above tweets close to the mark? Speak your mind in the comments!

Space Invaders accidentally invents difficulty curves

When someone says "retro arcade game", there's a pretty good chance that a picture of one of these little blocky aliens pops into your head. 

1978's Space invaders was so influential that even Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Nintendo's cornerstone franchises, has pointed to it as the game that "revolutionized the industry". 


Like all retro games, the key is that it's effortless to start playing, and next to impossible to master. At the beginning, the alien ships are just lined stupidly in front of you in rows. You just have to pick them off with your laser, right? ah, but as you decimate their numbers, something happens: They go faster. 


It made for an absolute perfect difficulty curve. success was rewarded with greater challenge. The more aliens you killed, the harder it got. And when you got down to those last few aliens, you had to have lightning reflexes. 

The thing is, the scaling difficulty was totally unintentional. The entire game was programmed and built by one man: Tomohiro Nishikado. And by built, I mean that he spent an entire year custom developing the hardware for the game because the hardware available in japan at the time wasn't powerful enough to run it. It was like the Crysis 2 of 1978. 

And when it was all finished, Nishikado discovered that the hardware still wasn't powerful enough to run the game how he intended it. He programmed the game to move all the liens at what he thought would be a pretty steady rate, but while play testing it, he found the aliens to be quite a bit slower than he wanted. There were simply too many on the screen for the hardware to handle, so it bogged down. 


As he played on, however, he discovered that the game sped up as he brought swift laser-justice to those invading alien bastards, fewer characters for the processor to keep track of meant it could finally move them at their correct speed. He liked the effect so much, he decided to keep it, saying it "added more thrills to the game"


Actually, you could argue it added the only reason to keep playing the game at all. It was the first game that actually got more difficult as you progressed. Before that point, games were pretty much the same all the way through (often repeating the same screens over and over), and it was basically a matter of waiting for your hands to get tired. 


This combined with the fact that it was the first game to implement a high score system meant that dedicated people put a lot of quarters into space invaders - it actually created a yen shortage in Japan. 


Read other modern gaming trends created by glitches at this link.

Deadline Extended for the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge [RELEASE]

[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]

The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge deadline for entry is now extended by one month, to August 31st. The reason? Challenge founder Daniel Solis will speak as a guest of honor at Gen Con!

Solis will devote an hour to discussing the Challenge and its current entrants. The deadline for entries is extended to allow Gen Con attendees just learning about the challenge to develop and submit their game.

Look for SEM1128728 in the events listings. Bring your prototypes and pitches!

The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge offers a $1,000 reward to a game designer who can create a game that will still be played by people a thousand years from now. For more information, visit www.ThousandYearGame.com

Gen Con: The Best Four Days in Gaming! is a consumer and trade experience dedicated to gaming culture and community. For more information, visit www.gencon.com or register at www.genconreg.com

Is the player an artist? - Redux

In case you did not follow the comments on the last blog post with my views on the player as an artist, you might have missed that James Portnow from Extra Credits responded and he and I had a brief exchange. This discussion is now up on the Escapist in case anyone is interested in checking it out:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/misc/8976-Extra-Credits-Addendum-Discussing-the-Role-of-the-Player

The articles has lot of interesting responses from the readers. I think I have already said what I have to say, so I will not discuss it further here. However, do feel free to continue the discussion in the comments!