Our latest game has just been released! San·go, which means 3·5 in Japanese, is a challenging word-creation puzzler. If you're looking for something a little more cerebral than Entropic Space, this is just the thing. It's generally pretty easy to get 20 points on any puzzle. For a bigger challenge, try to beat the high scores shown. Some of them are pretty impressive!

Play San·go!

The IDS has a nice article about us in today's paper. Many thanks to them for shining a light on our work.

One minor correction, though. That is Will in the picture, not me.

When I look back at the board games I played in my childhood, Monopoly stands out. Compared to games like Mouse Trap, Scattergories, and even Scrabble, Monopoly is much more complicated, takes longer, and requires more thinking (at least in terms of math and strategy). European board games are often similarly complicated, but in the US, family games tend to be simple and fast. So how did Monopoly get to be such a popular game?

The title of Philip Orbanes' Monopoly: the World's Most Famous Game—and how it got that way indicated that it would hold the answer. And there's definitely a lot of interesting material there, especially about the early days of the game. Unfortunately, most of the history of Monopoly had to be pieced together from patent filings, court cases, and the memories of early Parker Brothers' employees, so there's a lot of detail missing.

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Fun (and funny) is usually a spontaneous event. Nobody talks about "having fun at 6pm" the way we talk about eating or going to work. How do game designers (and comedians) take a randomly occurring thing like fun and make it a consistent experience?

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The weekend before Halloween, I attended a live event in the mountains of West Virginia for the alternate reality game Eldritch Errors. This event was the culmination of Book 2 of Eldritch Errors, titled "Scream in the Mountains," which took place over the month of October.

Almost the whole of chapter two was dedicated to building up the importance of "The Feast," an event held in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone where players could go and meet several of the main characters in person.

It's not often a designer gets to attend a major live event for another game, so I have quite a lot to say about it (as evidenced by the "Part 1" up in the title). In this part, I'll talk about the things I loved about the experience.

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How do you keep people from getting bored with your game?

From Donald Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things:

First, the object must be rich and complex, one that gives rise to a never-ending interplay among the elements. Second, the viewer must be able to take the time to study, analyze, and consider such rich interplay; otherwise the scene becomes commonplace. If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two components are required: the skill of the designer in providing a powerful, rich experience, and the skill of the perceiver.

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It really bugs me when I see glaring flaws in a product. Usually you can understand how those problems were left in, perhaps by mistake or under time pressure. Every once in a while, though, you run across something and can't help but wonder if they actually tested with real people or even just used it themselves.

My latest brush with this type of abysmal failure came from an unlikely source: leftover Halloween candy. For those unfamiliar with it, Jolly Ranchers are hard candies about the size of a quarter but much thicker. Recently, I came across a new version that's more like a stick of gum, although still a hard candy. Take a look at the picture and see if you can recognize the problem here. I'll give you a hint by telling you that the first two people who got a piece of the candy complained about the exact same thing.

The company took something that worked really well, a hard candy that you can pop into your mouth and suck on, and changed it so that you can no longer do that. That size is great for a stick of gum because you can fold it. With a hard candy, it becomes impossible to keep in your mouth. And if you pull it out occasionally, your hands get all sticky. What were you thinking, Jolly Rancher?

Video games are often about shooting things because that is an easy mechanic to implement. You make a bullet appear in your world, have it travel across the board, and see if it hits anything. Or, you point the “gun” at an alien, draw an imaginary line between the gun and that alien. If the line touches that alien, pow! Fire off the gruesome death animations and cue the visceral sound.

Guns are often easy to create and fun for the player to shoot off, that’s why we see a lot of shooter games out there. I play a lot of games with guns in them, so I have little to no standing to say that games with guns are bad.

I myself do not design games with guns. I believe in the power of alternatives.

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A little more than a year ago, we started working with Nogginaut and Chicago's Field Museum to create a series of games to embed in the Ancient Americas exhibit. To see any of them, you'd have to travel to Chicago, which is a little far for many of you.

But no longer! Now you can view video of the games from the comfort of your own homes by visiting our Ancient Americas page and following the links to the videos for each region.

Of course, for the full experience you'll still need to visit the Field Museum, which is well worth the trip!

Currently, I see ARGs (and games in generally) designed for three categories: education, marketing, and entertainment. Educational games tend to be relatively local and small, so they get less attention than the other types. Nevertheless, they're out there. When people talk about games, they sound as if they believe there's a vast gulf between these categories. I often hear comments like "I looked into GAME, but it's really just there to sell PRODUCT," "what's the point of GAME?" and "GAME sounds interesting, but it's educational." From a game designer's view, though, they're all much more alike than they are different.

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What makes an interesting, dramatic character? I’ve been asking myself this because so often NPCs in games are little more than roving guns / sidekicks or are Interesting Tidbit / Humor Dispensers.

The essential component of drama is conflict. Game designers tend to limit conflict to combat or obstacles, but that’s casting aside a whole host of possibilities. What we tend to miss is internal conflict, which ends up based on an internal contradiction. What happens when a pacifist is backed up against the wall or is put in a dangerous situation? Will they hold back or will they fight?

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From Bill Moyer's interview with Jane Hirshfield in Fooling with Words:

[Teahouse Buddhist] refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse on the side of the road. Nobody knows why they like to go there, they just feel good drinking her tea. She's not known as a Buddhist teacher... all she does is simply serve tea - but still, her decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it. No one knows about her faithful attentiveness to her practice, it's just there, in the serving of her tea and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups.

I've been thinking recently about balancing work and the rest of life, so this passage really struck me. In this view, balance is a matter of integration. Instead of working in her teahouse 9-5 and then practicing Buddhism in the evenings, the old woman makes it so that she practices Buddhism in her work. Even though I'm not a Buddhist, I think a similar concept applies. The things that I do are best when they extend naturally from who I am and what I believe. Doing things just to pay the bills or to please others, I'm less happy and my work just isn't as good.

I'm lucky that I'm at a place where I can do things like work on a casual game when that's what really drives me. I think that shines through in what I do.

I'd be interested in hearing how other people integrate their work with themselves. How do you make sure that what you're doing reflects what you believe?