some people doing rad things that i’m overdue to mention:

i’ll admit that i’m only aware of gregory weir’s ludus novus podcast becaause he wrote about annie for gamesetwatch, but it turns out he and i have been thinking along the same lines for a while. each episode of the podcast is only twenty minutes long, and tends to raise more questions than it answers. this is good, though, because they’re good questions: questions like “is it possible to have an unreliable narrator in a videogame when the player requires certain knowledge of the protagonist’s inner state in order to play?”

another webcast i’ve started following is scott nicholson’s board games with scott. like that costik guy, i think all designed games, be they board or video, have a shared history and sensibility. i can’t afford to play many board games, but i’m interested in their design. so i watch this campy bear explain the rules of a board game every couple weeks instead. he does more than go over the rules: often he attempts to give some impression of what the play is actually like in practice, or to explain the strategy that arises from those rules. i think the metropolys video is scott at his finest, though not because of (maybe in spite of?) the zero punctuation parody it opens with.

and while we’re stepping outside the realm of strictly digital games, the lucky juju pinball museum is both a wonderful place and a wonderful institution. pinball games are interesting to me because they’re conceptually similiar, in some ways, to videogames – they both involve the manipulation of an avatar (the ball) through a designed space to complete goals – but the physics that drive the game are the same physics that make our hearts beat and our world spin. they’re not artificial, they’re physical.

lucky juju is an important resource for understanding the evolution of design across the history of games – the documentation of which is a task we are just beginning. it’s also an avenue for experiencing pinball tables that might otherwise be impossible to encounter. their collection runs the span of pinball’s history, including tables like four million b.c. and orbital, which are fascinating conceptual snapshots. the above photo is from my slut’s collection of photos taken at lucky juju.

lastly, not that this blog aspires to be any kind of news site, but these kids have finished hacking mother 3 into english and the release is imminent. i played mother 3 about a year ago, in the japanese; i think it’s one of the most important games to be made in a long while, and it’s fucking admirable of them to do for no compensation what nintendo refused to pay people to do to bring such an important game to english-speaking audiences. if you’re interested at all in videogames telling stories, this game has a lot to say to you; if you happen to hold earthbound / mother 2 on a pedestal, this game has something to say to you in particular (and you might not like it).