Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony

Jamestown holds a special place in my heart, and for more reasons than because it's the only (and best!) video game I've ever been in the credits for.

See? See??

AND it's not just because two-thirds of Final Form Games' core design team graduated from a particularly remarkable institution (which I also attended).

No. Jamestown holds a special place in my heart because it is FABULOUS.

The premise is simple: Help Sir Walter Raleigh clear his good name by travelling to British-colonized Mars and find out what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke, all the while doing battle in your mechanized Conveyance against the allied Spanish/Martian forces.

It's astonishing nobody thought of it before.

If you, like me, used to hang out in arcades back when they were a thing, then you know what a vertically-scrolling space shoot-em-up (or "shmup") looks like. It looks like this.

You can tell by the fact that the number of bullets on-screen is countable that this isn't a very high difficulty setting.

Essentially, the screen scrolls at a fixed pace and you move your ship around within it, shooting baddies and trying not to get shot. At the end, there's a boss. There are several different ships to choose from (one at the start, three unlockable, and three more plus a random option in the Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot DLC), each with a primary and secondary fire and different specialties. At first glance, it's pretty basic for anyone who played this kind of game in an arcade.

Which makes the very subtle improvements the game adds to that formula all the more compelling. From the ground up, the game is built for local multiplayer, supporting multiple keyboards, mice, and controllers so that up to four people can play. The specializations of the ships themselves lend each a different role so that your strategies through each of the levels can vary drastically based on your composition. Another delightful mechanic is Vaunt, an ability which is charged by collecting coins (or maybe spare parts) from destroyed enemies. When you activate it, a shield appears around your ship that destroys incoming bullets and your firing power is doubled for a short time - at any point you can cancel your extra damage in exchange for a mush shorter, smaller shield. The strategy involved in vaunting is more complex than it seems - you can dive in front of an endangered ally and throw up a shield around him, or charge an enemy with your shield up to destroy its bullets as they're fired. It's hectic and split-second, and with a full four ships on a hard difficulty there can be a lot of incoherent shouting, and those are the most excellent moments of the game.

Moments like these are less excellent.

The fact that there's no online support, and that the game is a little short, are the main criticisms to raise over this game. But it's hard to see where online multiplayer would be able to provide the crowded-around-a-screen or peppered-around-the-living-room atmosphere that this game was tailor-made for. The game's about as long as it needs to be, and the extra difficulty settings, numerous bonus levels (the regular levels with special objectives, like surviving a screen full of bombs or getting a certain score within a time limit), and "gauntlet mode" where you play through all the levels in succession with limited number of lives mean that there are plenty of challenges to keep you busy even after you beat the final boss. And if you get tired of the main ships, you can pickup Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot, their DLC, which provides three new ships that add even more ridiculous fun to the game (and up to four more Guy Fawkeses per screen).

Choosing ships is like 9% "what will work well" and the rest is all "what will be totally badass."

I said the game is fantastic, and maybe the description above convinced you, but what makes it fantastic is how well everything meshes together with the setting they've established. The humor is perfect: They start with an absurd premise - the 16th-century British colonization of Mars - and play everything completely straight from that moment forward, and that's enough. Apart from an unlockable "Farce Mode" - which replaces the already-silly story with an even sillier telling wherein "Wally" attempts to give the Martians a time-out - nothing about the humor is over-the-top. It's just enough to justify the setting, provide a backbone to the action, and be hilarious. Like I said: perfect.

The art is similarly incredible, reminiscent of the aforementioned arcade games but with lots more heart and love poured in, and lots of attention paid to each pixel - the backgrounds of the five levels are dynamic and exciting, with little Redcoats firing from the ground on Martian ships, or cargo trains bellowing along alien railroads. It can be distracting, but you learn what to look at, and even novice gamers picked the game up quickly - a friend of mine with no prior shmup experience was ready to take on the last level with us after forty minutes of play or so. The soundtrack is worth picking up on its own, and is also completely straightfaced - energetic orchestral pieces that are unlike anything that's ever been put on top of a game like this before. All of them are of the highest quality, and the epic, 9-minute suite accompanying the last level (abridged) is one of my favorite pieces of music in any video game. It all fits, and it's all fun.

A few bugs marred play for us - finding that only one mouse was supported on a mac, for example - but overall the game is a lot of silly fun, and the price point is low enough that it's a really sound investment even if you only plan on playing it alone. But if you've got a group of friends to come with you, it's a must. This is probably the best multiplayer indie game of the last two years - and if you remove the "indie" qualifier, that sentence is probably still true. 

Final Form Games website - http://www.finalformgames.com/

Buy it on Steam - http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/

Get the deluxe pack, with the DLC and soundtrack. Very worth it.

Storytelling and Video Games: The Avatar

What makes video games significant as a new medium for telling stories?

This is something I've been struggling to express for some time and I'm hoping that talking about it here will help me organize my thoughts. This is only part one, not because I have other parts planned but because I expect I will need to do more in the future to address this fairly and completely. Basically, I'm trig to tease out why video games represent an important shift in the kind of storytelling we do as a culture, and why I think games let us do things other media has never done before. 

Today, I will start by talking about avatars, the playable characters controlled throughout gameplay. Because the avatar is usually the main character in the game, there are parallels, especially emotional ones, between them and the main character in a book or movie. Once we become attached to the character (if we do), their struggles become our struggles. The protagonist in a traditional, formulaic Hollywood movie is someone we can project onto*: they have some flaws that we can map to our own, but when forced into an emotional or physical struggle they behave the way we want to believe we would behave and are rewarded. We imagine ourselves in that role, at the centers of our own stories, and we can be comforted knowing that if this fictional character can succeed under adversity and be rewarded, so can we. This is how books and movies work: they let us safely experience situations, people, and worlds which we might not in our day-to-day lives, and generate emotional experiences that feel real but which are not threatening or permanent.


In video games, the same principles apply to your main character, except that now, you ARE that character. Listen to someone describe how a game is played: they don't say "You control a character who travels across landscapes and through castles trying to save a princess," they say "YOU travel across landscapes and through castles trying to save a princess."  They don't say "The ship on the screen blew up," they say "I blew up!" or "I died!"

The whole "I got run over by a mushroom and now I'm going to bounce in the air and then fall through the ground" thing does strain the player-avatar connection, however.

Because your character's fate depends directly on the player's actions, it's a lot easier for the player to feel as though they're participatory, and they're more likely to become anxious while playing a tough game or to wince or jump when something startles or attacks their on-screen avatar.


There's a lot more that can be said about the Avatar, but the major things I want to talk about here are two ways in which the avatar has been used in the past to bring the player into the story: skill and choice.


Skill-based video games - and most video games are skill-based to a greater or lesser extent - ask that the player complete some tasks, on behalf of his avatar, to move forward. In the case of Super Mario Bros, you must reach the end of the level without dying before time runs out. If you do die, or if time does run out, you are returned to the beginning of the level to try again. In terms of story (since ostensibly this post is about storytelling), Mario's doesn't continue unless you make it to the end; failure is a kind of "That didn't really happen" condition, so you replay to bring the story to its proper conclusion. This concept is brilliantly winked at in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is presented as a story recounted by its protagonist - when the main character dies, the narrator corrects this by saying "Actually, that didn't happen. Let me try again." In skill-based games, there's usually a story, and then there's failure; usually only success counts. A good contrary example, however, can be found in StarFox 64 - in one level, failure to destroy an enemy mothership quickly enough results in a friendly base being destroyed, and changes the player's next destination.

Whoops.

Though this is a failure the player has to live with, it doesn't significantly impact the story. Usually, skill-based games exist as a way to reward the player for their abilities; in victory, they share in the success of their avatar (saved the princess, saved the galaxy, etc.), which is made the sweeter because of the numerous previous disappointments of failure. The skill you have to demonstrate to beat the game is usually something you earn, so it's natural for players to feel accomplishment after many attempts finally yields a single success.


More recently, choice has been used as a way to bring players into games. In games like Mass Effect or Heavy Rain - both of which are games that are heavily reliant on (and often praised for) their stories - the player's choices can significantly impact the outcome of the story and of the game. Done well, this turns a game from one story into many stories, and done VERY well, these stories are all compelling, and the player feels that the choices she made throughout the game mattered. In the end, the story is her story, the player's story, not just the story of the protagonist or avatar.

You made this guy who he is, whoever he turns out to be. Good job.

Here's where it gets interesting. Both of these game elements, skill and choice, bind you emotionally to your protagonist/avatar because his fate is directly dependent upon your ability and your decisions. We've gotten so used to some tropes - slay the dragon, rescue the princess, defeat the evil-looking guy - that when those scenarios get set up, we don't really question them. It's when our preconceptions are subverted, and that emotional connection to your character is exploited, that you start to get the kind of experiences that are really unique to video games. A simple example that has already been well-executed in several games involves a sense of guilt or implication, emotions films and books have a tough time eliciting. If, in playing the game, we discover that the task our character was striving for is something that we ourselves aren't comfortable with, then we weren't just rooting for the player - like we might have been rooting for a character in a movie who becomes more unsavory throughout the story - but we actually enabled the character. We, the player, are personally responsible for all of the character's successes, and if we decide as the story unfolds that we don't like those successes, we still get to shoulder the burden for them.

Fortunately, everything in these two games you can feel completely ok about, all of the time. Yup.

To summarize: Because the player controls the avatar, and the avatar's success is linked to the player's choices and skills, the player's own investment in the success of that avatar can be strengthened even when the story is less nuanced or harder to relate to than stories in books or movies. In video games that emphasize story, a strong player-avatar link can be used to enhance the emotional feedback the player gets from the game, so that what happens to the avatar is felt more viscerally by the player. And for developers who really understand what players expect from their video games, subtly changes can play off those expectations to vary the emotions their game produces - and the surprise the players feel will itself be amplified by the player-avatar connection. 

There are reasons why we would expect that a video game's story wouldn't be as compelling as a book's, and some of those are valid; subtler emotions are easier for text to describe, given a talented enough writer. But the way the player-avatar connection links parts of our minds to what happens on screen is much more basic and primal than what we experience from non-interactive media, and if recent experiments suggest a trend, this may soon be one of the ways in which video games differentiate themselves as an important medium for telling stories.

LIMBO

Limbo is a gem I missed out on until recently, and even though it came out in 2010 I thought it would be worth sharing my experience with it (particularly since I haven't had a chance to play anything recent since my last review).

Limbo, succinctly put, is a full-fledged nightmare shaped like a 2d platformer. It doesn't have the jumpy monsters of Doom (which I will probably never talk about here), or the sheer pants-ruining helplessness and panic of Amnesia (which I will probably talk about more later), but what it has instead is a dark dreaminess, a slow wade through a place you aren't supposed to be and from which there is no departure.

(Fullscreen the trailer - the details are too spectacular to miss)

The protagonist, a nameless boy, awakens in the woods with no explanation. You guide him along across a dangerous landscape, evading, dismantling, or destroying hazards in your way. And there's no shortage of hazards.

Spoiler alert: None of these people are your friends.

The world you're in - a spectacular, grayscale landscape that even in its alarming hostility is always disconcertingly beautiful -  isn't hell. It doesn't even feel especially alien; the creaking bear traps, oversized arthropods, sparking signs, and whirring buzz saws are all familiar objects carefully tuned to be especially lethal. And they will kill you. Over and over again. Graphically, violently, and suddenly. 

You might not clear the saw the first time. If you don't, the result will be entirely predictable, but that won't make it any less awful.

Most terrifying, perhaps, is how impersonal all of this feels. Nothing seems like it's trying to kill you, specifically, for any reason other than your happening to be there, and when you die they'll go back to trying to kill the next poor creepy kid with glowing eyes who comes along. They don't really care about that boy.

And neither, after awhile, will you. The player/character link in Limbo is a very odd one. At the beginning, it's easy to put yourself in the boy's head, feeling a wondrous but chilly awe at the increasingly dangerous landscapes you're traversing. But after watching him drown for the fourth time, or get impaled in a spike pit, or getting lopped into roughly equal portions by a rusty trap, you need a little more distance than that. This is a character you can feel sorry for, and can try to help, but there's too much missing between whatever he's trying to do, whatever he knows, and what you the player are aware of. It feels a little like watching an old black-and-white horror movie with the dialogue and music turned off (actually, I think that would improve a lot of those movies). The gameplay is sculpted to match: you proceed linearly until you can't anymore, and then you solve a puzzle or find the proper way to evade an obstacle (after it dismembers you a few times first), and then you proceed linearly again. The amount of space you have to play around in is very limited; there's a correct solution to every puzzle, it's always very nearby, and you can't backtrack very far anyway. You'll never get lost, you usually won't get stuck on a puzzle too long, and often you'll see the answer and die a few times before you can properly execute it. This isn't to say the puzzles aren't tricky - some are incredibly devious, and none are at all repetitive, which is a significant accomplishment when the actions you can take are limited to "move," "jump," and "grab."  The joy is in seeing the boy triumph over little obstacles (and pride in figuring out how), and then anticipation, and some anxiety, for what the next freakish-but-beautiful scene will have for you. 

The atmosphere you end up with is a low, quickly-vibrating hum of trepidation and sadness, spiced with the occasional disgusting moment of horror - the things you have to do to survive this place are not always pleasant, and I solved more than one puzzle while repeating "Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!" to myself for about thirty seconds. But you'll do what you have to; you may not put yourself in the boy's shoes after watching him die so many times, but you'll want to protect him, and you'll want to see him through safely to the end of his journey. It's hard to explain how successful the game's atmosphere is, and to pinpoint exactly which elements mix up that smooth and slightly bitter blend of sadness, anxiety, determination, fear, and wonder you'll be tasting until the very end. It might be best to say that while the game certainly has everything it needs, it accomplishes the much more difficult task of omitting everything it doesn't need. I found the achievements a little distracting, but since all of them are attained by stomp on luminous white grubs to death, I can at least say that they don't break the mood.

Limbo isn't like the classic platformers of the 80's and early 90's, where your thumb would be swollen and bleeding after hours of trying to time the perfect jump, and it isn't like a pure-puzzle game with the kind of mind benders that make you want to do something regrettable to your computer. Like Dear Esther, Limbo's great success is in its atmosphere, and in the very real and sometimes painful emotions that atmosphere evokes. Unlike Dear Esther, whose story includes a multitude of clues and feels like it could be solved (with proper attention and maybe the help of a few illicit substances), Limbo doesn't really provide a lot of answers, which seems to fit its muted colors, entirely ambient soundtrack, and completely casual attitude towards horror and death. Limbo, like its name suggests, isn't about heaven or hell; it's a profile in liminal spaces, in the in-between spots that are bypassed unnoticed or forgotten as you wake up. It's warped, and its scary, and it's probably not for everyone, but if you can stomach the violence, you'll find it hard not to appreciate the beauty and artistry of this strange little blind spot. 

Website: http://limbogame.org/

On Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/48000/

The OUYA, The Console, and Indie Game Development

More than one person has asked me what I think of the OUYA, which people seem to either love or hate without much in the middle. If you want to read what the people who are making it (or claim to be) think, you can find that on their Kickstarter page.
Here's the short version. OUYA, as the developers imagine it, is a console intended to cater to indie games. It would be built on Android, and could support games for Android devices (including touchscreen games, with its own touchscreen on its controller), as well as new games developed particularly for the console. It would be easy to modify - owners could modify the hardware or software at their discretion. The games for it would be free or would have free-to-play elements, so developers could get their content to a broad audience and players would be able to sample games without having to buy them. OUYA is being billed as a way of getting rid of old limitations on consoles, including a weaker market for indie games and firm hardware and software capabilities, while at the same time waxing nostalgic about the era of the console it hopes to restore.

For some reason I'm nostalgic for everything about the SNES, including untangling cords and games just not working.

Having set out to raise $950,000 in a month, OUYA instead raised $2 million in their first day. Seven days in, they've raised almost $5 million.

They only ever show 60% of the controller in pictures. The other 40% may still be in development. 

There has been some controversy over this. One group says OUYA is going to revolutionize gaming, and that it's a logical and exciting step forward for indie developers that may be one of the greatest innovations in video game history. Another group says it's the greatest fleecing of the consuming population ever to happen anywhere, let alone on Kickstarter, that the console will never appear, and that the fact that so many morons are willing to throw money at it signals the imminent collapse of western civilization.

I may be overstating both positions slightly. The most major question is whether what OUYA promises - a $99 console within the next year or so that will be a significant enough improvement over the PC and existing systems to be commercially viable - is at all realistic or possible. A secondary question is whether it was a good idea in the first place.

Without completely characterizing where people fall on those questions, I'll say both that I think it's possible, and I think it's a good idea.

I want to immediately qualify those statements by saying "But it may very well still fail and it's entirely possible that a lot of money is about to evaporate, leaving behind a smoking crater and tens of thousands of really pissed off gamers."

But I don't think those are good reasons not to be optimistic, and even if you're not, I don't think pessimism is a good reason to avoid getting behind it.

Nothing in the hardware is especially revolutionary. Mass production and quality testing might be complicated, but with the right know-how and without the complexities of moving parts (no disc readers, etc.) I think it could be doable. I certainly don't think anything about this project says that it's too big or too complicated to be done, especially with as much money as has been spent on it in its first week. Sure, it will need a lot of developers, but if the interest in it is big enough - which the aforementioned $5 million-in-one-week suggests is possible - then developers will be drawn to it. Daniel Cook of Spry Fox and Jenova Chen of thatgamecompany have already expressed interest; if people of their creativity and energy got behind the product, you can believe that even if it's not successful, it'll certainly be interesting. As a developer myself, currently working on a game that wouldn't work on phones but is very undemanding of most PC's, I'll say that I'd love to have a console like the OUYA to develop for if their distribution model seemed to work, and if I thought it would help me reach an audience. With me, as for most developers, the question is mostly how excited the gaming population seems to be about the OUYA. If it keeps on its current trajectory, I for one will be trying to get a dev kit.

As far as whether it's a good idea, I think that it represents a change in the way we think about consoles. I don't know if that should take this form, but I think it should take some form and this is the best shot I've seen so far. I, for one, like the idea of indie games having a more dedicated place on the console. Admittedly, there are lots of ways to get indie games on your consoles these days, but I can imagine that a system particularly tailored to the indie market could end up being better for it, particularly if the devs had more license to make modifications to the system.

I don't know if this system is going to be the "revolution" it promises; the OUYA is a video game console, and if it does that successfully then it doesn't need any further manifesto. If it really is the game developer's system, then maybe it will end up being a place for devs with new ideas but few resources to get their ideas out to an audience tired of the same-old, same-old. If it fails in that, then it has proven that people are at least willing to put their money towards a similar idea, and it's entirely possible that a successor will have better luck. Is it possible that the OUYA might burn investors to the point where they won't be willing to try again? Absolutely - but even if that happens, I don't think the 38,000+ people who put money into it are going to want to give up that idea so easily.

Do I want to like the OUYA? Yes. Do I think it has the potential to be a big, big change for our industry? Yes. Do I think it has the potential to fail catastrophically? Yes. Am I going to support it anyway? Yes. I don't think these people are trying to steal our money, I think they're trying to make something cool, and as a developer I'd rather put myself behind it, win or lose, and hope that one day - maybe as soon as March, when they're planning to release - there will be a group of developers and gamers ready to accept it.

Dear Esther

If you haven't heard of Dear Esther - which you may have, since it came out this past February - then you've missed out on one of the strangest, most magical islands since the original Myst, with a story and experience no less significant or breathtaking.

If I were going to do this review properly, I would have done it in February, when Dear Esther came out. If I were really going to do it properly, I'd have done it back in 2008, when the game was being developed as a mod for the Source engine. Even after this all this time some people still haven't decided whether it should really count as a "game" - it doesn't have the puzzles or challenges games usually have. What it does require is engagement: it is a story whose pieces are not presented, but must be found. If a "first person game where you shoot things" can be called a "first-person shooter," then Dear Esther is a first-person listener, or a first-person rememberer, though any genre is going to be too narrow to adequately describe what developer thechineseroom has so delicately and elegantly crafted.
 

If you know the "memory palace mnemonic" - where you picture yourself walking through a house, associating important facts with objects or rooms - you have a sense of how the story of Dear Esther plays out. You are on an island, with no up-front explanation, and as you enter a house or glance at a distant cliff face, your character muses on the significance of these places, giving a glimpse of a story. The effect is something like walking a familiar path after years of absence, with details suddenly sparking vivid memories. The character shares these memories with you, and though his prose is a bit florid, the one or two places where it feels overwrought can be forgiven for how evocative and beautiful it is elsewhere. The world you're exploring feels old and real; the places you're exploring feel discovered, or remembered, more than created. It's hard to remember a game that evokes such raw emotion; with no mechanics or gameplay tension to distract you, it's easy to give yourself over to the story and the visuals. The less I tell you about the story, the better; not only because there are elements I don't want to ruin for you, but because the story is most successful in what it omits, leaving the details to the player's imagination. You'll be better off filling those in yourself, finding your own interpretations of the emotions the game elicits.

The official trailer (above, and on the game's website) says everything you need to know about the graphics and sound. Even if they didn't do a smooth job setting the mood - which they do - they would still be inviting and beautiful. There's nothing pushing the limits of what's been done with video game graphics here, but the details all feel necessary, and the attention payed to each view is seldom seen. Jessica Curry's soundtrack is wonderful and unobtrusive and sad, and even if it's not the easiest stuff to whistle, it'll hold you to the game, and always feels at home under the narrators reminiscences.

Questions about whether Dear Esther qualifies as a "game" might be interesting from an academic point of view, but they're irrelevant to the experience. Certainly, if it's an "experimental" game, the experiment is a success; Dear Esther is taking steps into uncharted territory and finding something amazing there, and I hope it changes the opinions of devs, gamers, and non-gamers alike about what's possible in the medium. Given what an achievement it is that thechineseroom's creation works at all, it's exciting and wonderful that it works so well.

If I were to give one piece of advice about Dear Esther, it would be not to approach it expecting a game - not because it isn't one but because it doesn't behave like one. Don't be expecting the kind of excitement that comes from a shooter or the strategy that comes from an RTS. Arrive at it with as few expectations as you can have, and let it take you at its own pace. There's no hurry - the way the light catches the cliffs, or the stream passing by a barbed wire fence, or the strange scrawlings on a cave wall are the soul of the game, so take the time to enjoy it. There's something to be found here that no other game has yet tried to offer, and it'd be a shame to miss it.

Website:  http://dear-esther.com/
Steam download: http://store.steampowered.com/app/203810/ (Steam's summer sale is going on, so keep checking back - might be available on the cheap!)

The Introduction

A few weeks ago I was looking over the images showcased in the Art of Video Games exhibit currently in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC, and I realized that the next few years will probably show a fundamental shift in video games and how the world sees them. When I explained this feeling to my friend, he wanted me to be more specific, asking me what I thought were the most exciting things in the video game industry right now. After some consideration, I came up with the following:

-The player base for video games is rapidly expanding. Wii, games based on social networking, mobile games, and others are causing a population well outside of the traditional young and/or "geeky" fan base to start consuming video games. Stereotypes about what kinds of people are games are being called into question. Some people are absorbed into the consumer base without really thinking about it, as legions of Angry Birds fans have been, while other groups, such as some female gamers, are trying to create a place for themselves within circles that haven't figured out how to include them. The question "Who plays games?" is much more vague than it used to be, as are its answers.

-The barriers to entry into game design are falling. Certainly, making a game requires dedication and spare time, but two of the most significant barriers - money and means of distribution - are fading. Free game development software is becoming more available and more nuanced, so the number of indie game makers has shot up, producing a number of personal favorites like Jamestown, Braid, or Limbo, any of which might not have been successful if they could have been released ten years ago. While the sheer number of work hours needed to create a triple-a game are still beyond what any single person, or even small, dedicated teams, are able to put together, smaller-scale projects are now well within reach given some of the new tools available. Beyond that, digital distribution is becoming the norm, giving smaller projects with less funding the ability to reach a broad audience. The game makers that didn't exist before are now able to sell their games to game players that didn't exist before.

-The video game, as a technology and an art form, is evolving. Video games continue to employ the latest technologies, but how all those pretty new graphics cards and all that memory is being used has changed. Games like Minecraft forgo seamless graphics in favor of a staggeringly huge world, games like Dear Esther use their visuals not for gunfire and heart-racing but to draw you in to a story that feels personal, honest, hazy, and lonely. Moreover, games come at a time when society itself is changing rapidly to embrace a world connected by technology; we play games with people from all over the world on a daily basis, and we find ways to "gameify" life (consider Fitocracy, a social "game" based on exercising) that stretch our considerations of where a game ends and the rest of the world begins. When one takes together the exponential increase in computing power available to game makers, the broadening of the player base, the advent of a new wave of indie developers, and the emotional depths games are beginning to sound - and the respect that earns the medium as a whole - it's hard not to see this medium as something fascinating, volatile, and wonderful.

I am a game maker, a game player, and a game lover. I intend to use this space to give my thoughts on games - my own, other people's, the gaming world in general. I have a particular focus on indie games; I'm an indie game maker myself, and I love seeing what people do with little money and huge hearts, and to share the not-infrequent treasures the indie game world offers with as many people as possible. I'll be updating Tuesdays and Fridays, and I'd always love to see comments - things people want me to talk about, things people like or don't like, etc. If you enjoy the Twitter, which is something I am still discovering, you can follow @ponderouspixel and I will probably follow you.

Video games give as an outlet, give us a way to be someone we're not, give us a way to see things we don't normally look at and talk with people we don't normally talk to. They require an investment of self, a soul-bearing, that books and films do not demand, and when a game maker catches us in that vulnerability and shakes us alive, we get to see a beauty that no other art form has ever captured so exactly. Video games need more consideration. Consider them with me now.