ROMchip is hosting free, online talk about my new book The Impossible Reversal. I'm going to talk about how games came to be designed objects in the 1950s, and some early management simulation games played on IBM mainframes! Find out more at: www.tickettailor.com/events/romch...

Oops I think the right tag is #SCMS26 but here is another cool video of the chess set as recompense

If anyone's at #SCMS you can come to the Optical Play panel tomorrow at 11am to play with my version of Shigeko Kubota's video chess (and see many other cool optical toys from Amanda Shubert and Meredith Bak)

At SCMS I'll be talking about some work on Shigeko Kubota's Video Chess, from work related to The Impossible Reversal. To help understand it in a deeper way I built a piece inspired by it (and will be carting it to Chicago). If you're there come and play!

Ooh, my book has been spotted at GDC (in excellent game studies company)

I just got my author's copy of The Impossible Reversal from @uminnpress.bsky.social and it looks absolutely gorgeous! My deep thanks go out to Jason Weidemann and the rest of the editorial team who shepherded the manuscript into being! You can pre-order it now from the press or bookshop.org

Post a game you remember playing that nobody else remembers...

My favorite secret game (Yoko Ono):

Looking across Patterson's work, he had a clear interest in systems and simulations, and A Game is a procedure for constructing the social out of capacities different than those assumed by Rawls. In my archival digging I found some notes from the same era where Patterson summarizes this procedure:

I got to look at three versions of the game at MoMA and the Getty, which differ primarily in the quoted text they pull from from an issue of the artist magazine Ark (1962) on mobs and crowd psychology.

I've been editing the page proofs for my forthcoming game studies book, The Impossible Reversal (coming out in Feb with @uminnpress.bsky.social). I'm starting to get pretty excited! The table of contents turned out to be pretty enticing, no?

Lastly, @droqen.bsky.social's The End of Gameplay is a series of short game poems that reflects on the medium and on what it means to live honestly in the present moment. It can be played in half an hour, but its been consuming my thoughts for much longer. A really special one. (17/17)

I've talked about Daniel Linssen's work before, and their small offering is A Knife Made of Whispers. You must carry a light through the darkness, in an echo of games like Ico. And Linssen layers the space with an unfolding story of love and regret.

Mechanically, Peppered isn't that strange (though the chair-scooting is interesting), but it is ambitious and generous in a way that feels rare. It aims for the humorous and achieves the zany, like a lost cousin of Sam & Max. And all the component parts speak to one another. (15/17)

An inversion of that dimensional reduction is AtoB, which asks the player to strategically cut out a 2D path from a 3D landscape and then traverse it. The player can upgrade their movement, which means they constantly have to evaluate what they might be able to reach or dodge. (14/17)

And now the more experimental batch! First is a proof of concept called Line: A 1D Platformer. It represents height by color--gray scale for platforms and blue--red for objects and enemies. When you jump you shift hues, which reorients the player to the temporal rather than spatial aspects. (13/17)

Or, the shorter game Raven Star, where you play a bird kicked out of its nest because it lost its wings. You can't jump, and that lack becomes a way of reflecting on your identity and belonging. Nothing too complex, but a ugly duckling allegory made for the GameBoy. (12/17)

I feel some pride in the growing number of platformers made with GBStudio and my tool PlatformerPlus. For instance, Kero Kero Cowboy. So many frog avatars in my lists. This one has Kirbyish spunk combined with levels designed to coherently push one or another aspect of movement.

Symphonia came out in Dec last year, and is a fun if straightforward romp (when it is not throwing precision challenges at the player). In a few rare moments it leans into its musical themes and we see the potential for another kind of game where motion and movement gently coincide. (10/17)

Haneda Girl is an explosion of action with complex and responsive character controls. You dash, slash, turn invisible, and pilot a mech through short time challenges. Like its precursor, Narita Boy, the narrative elements are genre cliques that wear thin, and its levels have little character. (9/17)

There have been a couple of big releases this year. I've been following the Siege and the Sandfox for a while (partly because it uses Unreal). It is a stealth metroidvania with a few really spectacular moments. But ultimately its narrative, visuals, movement play the same note too often. (8/17)

The other game using this design philosophy is Mosa Lina: Second Layer, a big update to the original. It puts you in tiny physics arenas with a random selection of 3 of its 48 weird tools (tentacles, unicycles, bottle rockets) to work out how some solution might emerge in the intersection. (7/17)

A third continuation from last year is a style of design I noted in GoodBoy Galaxy that takes a mechanic from the player for each it gives. Babushka's Glitch Dungeon makes the player select two spells that dramatically transform movement, and asks the player to imagine their combinations. (6/17)

Smooth movement can be challenging in Pico8 games, so platformers often get inventive. Prince of Prussia makes stepping and jumping into turn-based actions, and thus strategic choices where a wrong move can get you shot by a Nazi. (5/17)

Doctor Lind is another micro-vania made in Pico8 where you explore the guts of a whale. It also removes jumping, instead giving the player a hookshot that can flip gravity. There are only 32 screens in total, but the paths are twisted to force doubling back after getting power-ups. (4/17)

There are also an increasing number of micro-vanias: games that try to capture the same feeling in a 10 minute experience. 100 lil Jumps initially seems like a precision challenge, but then starts to branch and twist so that your 100 jumps become a limit to knowledge rather than progression. (3/17)

A couple of micro-trends that I mentioned in my wrap up from last year continue. The momentum platformer had a strong showing in SeaFrog, which elegantly combines skating and traditional platforming. It piles on style, and makes many thoughtful design choices (esp. with enemies). (2/17)

(39/?) Tales of Kenzera: ZAU was one I stumbled upon late this year. I really like the story told through conversations with the god of death as a spirit companion and the idea of switching masks. However, the level design and combat both became pretty repetitive.

(38/?) Neva was the most visually splendid game I played this year by the developers of Gris. I found the combat interrupted the more contemplative play of its predecessor, and led to more flat and linear level design. Some of the individual moments of confrontation were magnificent though.

(37/?) Ending my list with some oddballs. My favorite platformer of 2024 was Goodboy Galaxy. It gives the player three tools--a gun, a shield, a jump--but charts multiple paths per level by stripping one of the three. A total surprise, inventive and charming, with Mario 64 as my closest referent.