The game-discourse is entering a new arena. “Games as Art” seems to be one of the emergent topics at the moment, that is growing into relevance. You eventually have heard of the Project Horseshoe conference. They – in own words – address the “game-designers hardest problems.” At Gamasutra is a longer wrap-off of some of their insights about what is making games as art hard. They do not only look at the progress of making a game itself, but also take a look on the underlying context, where games appear and are played. Or about the approach of an artists versus game designer.

Done. Gave some credit to the designer of the “Twitter bird”. He sold this artwork via a stock-service (iStockphoto) for about 2 – 8 Dollars, Wired says. At least all legal.

Oxley at first did not even noticed, that his bird was used for Twitter – he got aware of it, as some staff member was asking him, if he can animate the bird. That was back in the days, when Twitter was not popular like today.

Oxley seems to be a fair kind of guy. He kindly asked, if they could gave him credit for the design at the webpage on Twitter. It did not happen. Still all is legal. He is fully aware of the things, that are happening. As asked, if he is happy with the situation or if he feels hurt, Simon Oxley said something beautiful:

“I believe a designer can only be ‘hurt’ when they stand in line – instead of constantly seeking new inspiration and producing new things with their ever-increasing experiences.”

And here is Simons Webpage: I do Kung Foo.

(via Wired)

DIGAREC, the Digital Games Research Center of the University of Potsdam, published a book about Game Philosophy, that is freely available on the web. The contents are the proceedings of a conference, that was held in May 2008. It covers three topics, that should be relevant to philosophical questions about games: ethics and politics, the action-space of games, and the magic circle. The latter is dealing with the border between games and non-games. The book in total has 344 pages. Direct download pdf.

via A Maze

2D-Boy, the man best known for his game “World of Goo” gives us some neat hints, on how to make a good game within 48 hours. It was because of, yeah, the Global Game Jam. Many thanks!!

A very good contribution by Jeff Atwood on weblog Coding Horror: He quotes and analyzes Paul Buchheit, the original lead developer of GMail, telling that “overnight success” is misleading and pointing you in the wrong direction. From our current point of view and experience it is quite funny, if we look at the things, that Paul Buchheit says about the development of Gmail. The service is not only quite popular this days, but meanwhile got the best growing numbers of all e-mail services on the web:

“Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps “reboot” it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 — two and a half years after starting work on it — many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users. Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as ‘niche’, and ‘not used by real people outside of silicon valley’.”

Every success is taking years and years in preparation and break through. Sure, when success is there, it’s there. And everbody is thinking of “overnight”, especially when there are new people on the radar, that nobody knew before. I am totally not an opponent of the “think smarter, not harder” principle. But, it is somehow clear to me, that betting on the “next big thing” overnight is not a wise strategy in some very special ways – it can be very frustrating as well. Overnight success is something, that do not come overnight, but is something that is perceived overnight by others.

Continue quoting Codinghorror. I totally agree at this point, where he Jeff quotes Peter Norvics “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years“

“Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.”

Thinking smart is part of the practise and experience you made yourself. Search for passion instead of fast success and everything will go its way. If you do that, success will come, and if you don’t expect it, eventually overnight. Passion and practice. Totally agreed. It’s more about having patience and a long breath. Be pragmatic.

Indiecade had a very good and clean interview with Keita Takahashi on their site. You may know Keita Takahashi from games like Katamari Damacy and the latest “next big thing” Noby Noby Boy. Some good quotes:

“Since tests projects are by definition comprised of very few members, it was a very good experience because even the rookies had to carry their weight. This, combined with the ability to talk to the planners and programmers directly, made it a very good and rewarding environment.”

“Overall though, I feel a certain jealously in that the atmosphere of freedom that older games had has been lost in modern games. Even if they were crappy games, there were plenty of hidden moves and tricks. It was possible to enjoy and laugh at things like that. That kind of atmosphere of freedom is much more difficult to create now.”

Yesterday I found this about 90 minute lecture from Will Write about game design. This is nothing new indeed, it is from November 2003. But what should I say? Is is premium content for free and thinking about design issues is never a wrong thing. It is about various things about game systems, motivation, psychology, artificial intelligence and simulation. Just like the games Will Wright likes to make, the talk touches many aspects, but without having this goal or “defeating the enemy”. It is circling about this and that. It’s more like the systemic approach what he is talking about: “possibility space”, “failure states”, “topologies” and “feedback loop” just to name a few. Would having a game with enemies and boss-fighting something like an orgasmic experience from his point of view? At least it would be a special subset of a system, that encourage the user to act. Will Wright thinking.