Critical failure…

The Wheeler Centre here in Melbourne recently ran a series of panels under the banner of ‘Critical Failure‘. These took in film, books, theatre, and the visual arts, and were designed to promote debate.  And promote debate they did, with it spilling out of the Wheeler Centre and across the internet on Crikey, the ABC, in the Guardian, and on blogs.

I think these debates are incredibly interesting, both because they reveal the huge schism between those critics working in traditional print media and those working online (and, in fact, their opinions of online), and also because of what you can learn from them about criticism and how it might relate to games and the broader culture.

Click through for my thoughts… Continue reading

Freeplay…

It’s been pretty quiet around here, not because I don’t have things to say, but because I’ve been working pretty flat out on pulling together Freeplay – which, if early accounts & the vibrant twitter feed are to be believed, was pretty succesful.

In the run-up, I wrote a fairly lenghty post about my own personal goals for the event, reflecting on the creative aspects of designing a festival.   I might still publish that if I ever get time to edit it, but I wanted to share one of my favourite comments (from twitter) about what we did.

#freeplay10 feels a lot like reading DanC’s Lost Garden, where many of the principles discussed can easily relate to any application in life” – GameTacoWall, 11:29 Aug 14

I couldn’t have put it better myself :)

Goals and opposition in Fabric

This latest build of Fabric introduces goals – helping the blue particles to coalesce and eventually form suns & planets – and opposition – in the form of the red spikey particles which can destroy the blue particles.

What’s interesting here is how much focus has been pulled away from the grid – which was the original element.  It feels like the more nouns that are added to the game space, the less interesting & dynamic it becomes.   All the player is really doing in this version is clicking on the red spikey particles, rather than balancing destroying the grid & stitching it back together.

Next step, I think, is to pare it back and consider how the player interacts with the grid because adding elements to the space doesn’t seem to work.  That might be some time because this week, there’s the Digital Distribution Summit, I’m running some workshops in Yarrawonga, and the flying to Sydney to do a presentation at Screen Australia – then we’ll be into October and the first of the Freeplay Experimental Gameplay Projects.