Thanks for posting this James! I studied players in There from 2003 until its closure last year (apparently it's my lot in life to study refugees from games that close.) There was on par with Second Life both in terms of subscriber numbers and in terms of what it offered as a product, but was highly under-publicized by comparison (Case in point: There's no NWN for There.com!) Many "Thereians" have migrated to Second Life, some reluctantly, and others were left in a refugee limbo status. Some of the newer worlds currently in development have also been courting There refugees to create a new client base, as There did with the 400+ Uru refugees who migrated there in 2004. It will be interesting to see what happens with this! If people want to know more about There, as far as I know I am the sole researcher who has written about it to date. You can find my publications as well as info about my book at my home page: http://www.cpandfriends.com

Terris this is a really wonderful take on the meaning of "well-played game," in which "everybody wins." I really like your comment that 'When I am playing games like Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Virtual Fighter, Blazblue, or King of Fighters, I feel that some of us are "losing" from the beginning.' I'm so pleased you were able to take what you learned in the class and put it into practice in what I think is a very successful project.

Dan, this made me laugh so hard I cried. I really appreciate your candor. I am also delighted to hear that you actually got something out of the class in spite of yourself! And indeed, your game did, in many ways epitomize the themes we covered throughout the term. But perhaps due in part to your rye cynicism, and in part to the general obstreperousness of your team, it did so without being pedantic, while at the same time being exceptionally fun. I'm also pleased that you "got" that the whole point of the project is to learn how to work in a team. This is the secret of success in the game industry: no matter how brilliant you are, if you can't play well with others, you're doomed. The greatest irony of all is that you're game WAS the test, and you passed with flying colors!

Great Post-Mortem Jason. I actually think that your game benefited from the inability to implements some of your intended features. You managed to convey aspects of the story through mechanics and aesthetics in a way that, at this point, makes cut scenes an unnecessary distraction. What you also did really well, as has been done in both Braid and Spectre, is create a really unified world that is successful in conveying the emotions you want to get across; the complexity of the world itself, even with a simple game mechanic, says a lot. In the long run, that you made a game that is simpler than your initial intent is a feature not a bug. Although I think it will be great to refine the game further (maybe get it ready for an IndieCade submission), and maybe add some of those additional features, however, I think the simplicity turns out to be one of its strengths so be sure not to overdo it!

Well done Tom. I some nice thematics running through the blogposts: games without goals, games without winners, games with changing rules. I particularly like your analysis here because I think in the video game medium we really take this notion for granted. Players often talk about "beating" the game...Winning has been argued by many contemporary game theorists as a requisite feature of something we call "a game." You did a nice job here of analyzing how each of these games subverts the convention of a "win state" in a very specific, experiential way.

Really nice post, David, and hilarious title!

First of all Nic, this is a GREAT essay...really well developed and written. But of course you really got me with the Uru example. One thing I think we can say about Uru is that the game in many ways embodies the spirit of the New Games movement, beyond simply the examples we use in the Ludica paper but in the sense that it's a cooperative game! I don't think it's entirely an accident that the Baby Boomers of Uru are of the same generation as New Gamers. This is precisely why Ludica called for a "new" New Games movement in our paper. We felt like it was time for another revolutionary stance on gaming. We are long overdue for one!

Vignesh, you won't be surprised to hear that I think this essay is really FANTASTIC, given my own philosophy about multiplayer games. One point you've made here that is really excellent is that even single-player games become multiplayer games in some form. My nephews used to play Indiana Jones and The Sims, all sitting together on the same chair; for them it was ALWAYS a multiplayer game, even though there was only one input. Some have called The Sims a "massively single player game," which I think it an appropriate characterization: what has really sustained the game's success is the community that built up around it, even though the gameplay itself is designed for a single-player. It makes me wonder...are game designers really that out of touch with their players that they would continue to design with this one-player/one-screen paradigm? Maybe we (collectively!) need to rethink this model entirely.

This is a great post...I love these random "not doing it for a grade posts." What I really like about this is that you are essentially analyzing the "game mechanic" of the film. In fact, if I did not know it was a film you were describing, I could easily have mistaken it for a game. It has all of the elements we associate with many games that use the "trials" sort of model for a story. I think your points are well-taken about enjoyable films having game-like attributes, although I would argue that not all films are game-like. Here are a few examples of gamelike films that I recommend that could also do with a "ludic" analysis (I have dibs on the last one!): Groundhog Day, Run Lola Run, TimeCode, Memento, 8 Mile.

Daniel this is cool, but it's also derived (appropriated? ripped off?) from a very popular party game. I think it's interesting that he makes no mention of it in his description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Blank_White_Cards Do I see another "Landlord's Game/Monopoly" story in the making?

First of all, Matt, nice lead-in with the joke. Here's another one: A Rabbi, a Priest and a Guru walk into a bar, and the bartender says "What is this? A joke?" What is really great about this article is something that I've been trying to drill into your brains all semester, and evidently it's working: CULTURAL CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. Your point here is very well taken...these groups are essentially "playing" in the same space, they are just very different groups with very different frames of reference and intentions. This is one of the reasons I have said: think about WHO is playing your game. Fun is not the same for everyone. Stewart Brand is not going to consider Counter-Strike to be fun. The other thing I think your essay highlights is that for each of these groups, the PROCESS OF MAKING THE GAME is part of the fun; there is a great deal of focus on the creation of the game itself, and that is, in a sense, part of the game. It is interesting to note that Counter-Strike was developed by a distributed team. Whereas the "basement" culture was a bunch of guys co-conspiring together to transform a sci-fi novel into a computer program. Anyway, good work. Oh by the way, I think in the third paragraph you might be mixing up Brand and Suits...I don't think Suits wrote about the Mother Earth game, but I could be mistaken.

...Oh, and remind me to tell you the Uru hide-and-seek story next week.

Dan I really like your Ragnarok online story. A great deal of emergent gameplay evolves AFTER players have reached some kid of end-game state, at which point they experiment with more open-ended and subversive play types. So the anti-game described by the New Game readings can also come about not as a reaction against, but as an outgrowth of conventional gameplay.

Nice job of looking at personal experience through the lens of the readings.

I really like this idea. It has a lot going for it. It's one of those "Closure"-type games with a core mechanic that really has "legs." The light manipulation combined with the "Jack-and-the-Beanstalk" mechanic can really go in a lot of interesting directions. It's not clear yet from these docs the aesthetic you are going for...I'm assuming the stick-figure design is just a mock-up. But I could also see this going in a really creative direction visually, with an emphasis on the plants, each of which could have it's own unique visual style, which includes the animation; some could also be flowering. It could be visually really beautiful. You might want to look at Flower, and also Blueberry Garden for some ideas about how to handle the art direction. I could see this game being a very submlime experience based on the art style and the animation of the plant growth. You might aslo want to look at Feed on Fractals, from last year's class: http://flux.blogs.com/gamedesignandculture/2008/12/feed-on-fractals.html

Brilliant post David. This is an exemplary rendition of this assignment! You covered all the bases and brought in your own personal experience as well; it's also well-structured and articulate.

Jason this is a fantastic essay, and I like the way you articulate the way individual players can lean towards certain aspects of games and play within their individual play styles. The only problem is that you didn't include Huizinga and Suits in this, but I think you did one of the most thoughtful analyses of this assignment esp. vis a vis describing specific game elements and how they map to the theoretical ideas discussed.

Nice post Tom. You make an excellent point here about game hacks: game hacks seldom provide an absolute solution to a win condition, rather typically provide incremental improvements. For instance, no-one would make a game hack of Dragon Crawl that would give the Orb and take you to the exit. By doing this you would eliminate the entire point of the game, which is, in Suits words, to accomplish this goal through the least efficient means. Within that hacks might make some aspects more efficient, but they are rarely use to achieve the desired game state in one fell swoop.

This is good Terris. Not much about Suits, but I really like your take on the idea that games have social value outside the game, a conclusion drawn by some of your classmates as well.

Richard this gets off to a good start, and I like the choice because this is a sort of subversive game that puts you in the role of the bad guy, and you tried to subvert THAT by being nice to your minions and prisoners. Where I think this falls short is that the application of the readings is rather thin. I would have liked to see you explore some of the key concepts in their application to the game and its features in a little more depth.

Really nice essay Jerry, and it addresses the nuances where these classical definitions fall short. I disagree with your analysis of Suits, however, because although the outcome may be variable, the process is achieved via following rules. You bring up cheat codes, but I think in digital games these are just thought of perhaps as a meta-game rather than the way cheating is construed in board games. Finally, your comment about the brotherhood got me thinking about the construction of "gamer." You could argue that the niche market I was referring to in my lecture last week is really the "brotherhood of gamers" (and I mean that as a very distinctly gendered reference), that is the idea that the default "gamer" position is male, and that it is an exclusive "club" for people in the know.

Very nice job David. A few typos/grammatical issues but otherwise, a nice analysis. I like the way you analyze the game from the player perspective, as each player might focus on a different aspect of the game or have a different experience of it's various aspects.