Handy Vandal's Almanac

Mark Venturelli has posted an interesting article about principles of game design structure:

Designing a game is designing a space of possibility. It is the creation of a structure that will play out in complex and unpredictable ways, a space of possible action that players explore as they take part in the game [Zimmerman and Salen 2004]. In a game of soccer, it covers all the possible movements of every player for every individual position of the ball in the field, every foul and every goal, and so on. It is the collection of all possible actions and outcomes inside the designed space of the game – all actions and outcomes artificially made possible by the system. The first goal of this work is to investigate how some techniques of restriction of this space can contribute to make fun casual games that can stand on their own in long-term play.

- Mark Venturelli @ Gamasutra

Escape From City 17 got a nice writeup at Wired recently.

The mixed-media movie was created on a shoestring budget by gamer/filmmaker brothers David and Ian Purchase, who “borrowed a page from the machinima playbook, exporting assets from Half-Life and combining the bleak videogame imagery with photographs and traditional video.”

Escape From City 17 – Part One

Half-Life Visuals Supercharge Sci-Fi Short Escape From City-17
– By Hugh Hart @ Wired

James Bridle reports:
“I just completed a working build of Donald Michie’s MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), an early (1960) example of machine learning. MENACE uses 304 matchboxes to play Noughts and Crosses (or Tic Tac Toe in the US) — and learns over time to play it better.”

MENACE is a machine that plays noughts and crosses, built out of 304 matchboxes. Each matchbox corresponds to one of the 304 board layouts that the opening player might face (there are actually 19,683 possible board layouts, but we only need to calculate the opening player’s first four moves, and many are rotationally or reflectively identical). In turn, each matchbox contains a number of glass beads corresponding to each possible next move. When it is MENACE’s turn to play, the operator simply selects the matchbox corresponding to the current state of play, shakes it, and opens it to see which move has been chosen. Each matchbox contains a small nook into which one bead falls–and MENACE plays in the square corresponding to that bead.

But what’s really clever is that MENACE learns. Every time it wins a game, an additional bead is added to each matchbox played, corresponding to each winning move. Likewise, every time it loses, a bead corresponding to each losing move is removed. As a result, over time, MENACE becomes more likely to play moves that have previously resulted in wins and less likely to play moves that have resulted in losses.

- James Bridle: A New THEORY of AWESOMENESS and MIRACLES: Being NOTES and SLIDES on a talk given at PLAYFUL 09, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE
- via Boing Boing

Over at A Year of Frugal Gaming, board game designer Jackson Pope of Reiver Games talks about quitting his job in order to make games for a living:

The amount of a working computer game you can make in your own time is about a thousandth of a working computer game, whereas I thought I could make a boardgame and get it be a finished product. Over the next three years I worked on a game which eventually became Border Reivers. I was very happy with it but I put it in a tupperware box and left it on my shelf.

A couple of years later I came back to it and thought ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got a working finished game here so I might as well do something with it’. I worked out I could make 100 copies, largely by hand, and sell them over the internet and hopefully make a little bit of money, so I did and 11 months later I’d sold them all! During that time someone else had sent me another game, which became It’s Alive. I made 300 copies of that by hand and sold them over the internet in 11 months, at that point I took the mad decision to quit my job and try and do it full time.

- Jackson Pope @ A Year of Frugal Gaming

Reiver Games

Pope adds:

“I’ve been blogging on Creation and Play for three years now, most people initially heard about me on there or on BoardGameGeek, publicising my game. I’ve now had 150 submissions; some good, some awesome, some not so awesome.”

Interview posted by Dave @ A Year of Frugal Gaming