This news makes it even harder to hate Google; with these tools the average joe can keep an eye on his ISP and make sure its not trying to sneak anything by him, and will help to keep those sneaky ISPs honest. Google may be the most massive company in the universe, but they sure are helpful.

This comes at the perfect time for men, because I’m beginning to suspect that our ISP is throttling us.

With the Monkey Island series now revived in the latest release from Telltale games, entitled Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, it might finally be time to announce that adventure gaming is back from the dead.

For any of you who didn’t experience the heyday of adventure gaming, The Secret of Monkey Island, released by Lucas Arts way back in the halcyon days of 1990, is considered by many to be one of the undisputable classics of the adventure gaming genre. Written in large part by Tim Schafer, the creator behind the upcoming BrƒÂ¼tal Legend, The Secret of Monkey Island had a fantastic story, hilarious and memorable characters, unique and satisfying puzzles, and some of the funniest dialogue ever featured in a video game. So it probably isn’t surprising that Monkey Island and its sequel amassed loads of critical acclaim and a pack of loving fans, who to this day nostalgically remember it as one of the best games of the early nineties.

Monkey Island wasn’t the only classic adventure game though. Indiana Jones, Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Star Trek, King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and many others were some of the most popular games of their time. But since those ancient, long-passed days of our youth, the adventure gaming genre has all but disappeared. What was once the most popular genre of PC gaming literally stopped existing, quickly and sharply losing popularity as the processing power of PCs and consoles ushered in an era of first person shooters and online gaming. It was a sad and puzzling development for fans of games like Monkey Island; adventure games brought great story telling, challenging puzzles and most importantly, an overall experience that was memorable in a way that no other gaming genre could provide.

As such, the fall of the adventure genre has long been a sore spot for its fans, and its long absence has been a puzzle that  many couldn’t solve (pun totally intended). But recently Telltale Games, the company behind the comeback of another classic Lucasarts title in Sam & Max as well as the Strongbad and Wallace & Gromit games, has been slowly and lovingly restoring the once extinct genre. Their latest project, Tales of Monkey Island, is finally bringing back the classic Monkey Island franchise.

Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal brings back the ghost pirate LeChuck and the bumbling, well-intentioned wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood, along with all the ridiculous and fun stories that go along with them. I don’t want to give away very much of the story, since one of the best parts of adventure gaming is experiencing all the crazy puzzles and developments on your own, but much like the very faithful Wallace & Gromit series, Tales of Monkey Island captures all the character and style of the original Monkey Island, with recognizable voices, a bizarre and silly pirate story, and of course the humour that fans have come to know the game for.

The game has transitioned into a 3D affair, which might irk some die hard fans, but none of the charm of the original 2D version has been lost. The review copy we received had a few expected bugs in it, but these have no doubt been ironed out by today’s release, as Telltale hasn’t been known to let buggy products out the gate in the past.

Basically, Telltale has proven a few times already how proficient they are at bringing classic adventure gaming into the modern gaming world, and Tales of Monkey Island is no exception. So, if you’re a fan of the original, or you’re just hankering for some puzzle solving, story telling fun, then Tales of Monkey Island is an easy choice. The game is great and it is worth your time.

So that’s over with. Now on to the big question: does the revival of Monkey Island signal a comeback of the adventure game genre?

The easy, completely uninformative answer is that it’s hard to say. There are so many genres and so many game companies in the enormous modern game industry that it’s almost impossible to tell if Telltale’s updates of adventure gaming classics are making a significant impact on the gaming industry. Back in the nineties the market simply wasn’t as big, so it was easy to tell what types of games were most popular. In today’s industry there is such a massive selection of games that even good games tend to get lost in the crowd sometimes, never getting the recognition they deserve.

But there is another way to look at it. Telltale games has released four episodic series of adventure games to date and don’t seem to be losing any steam yet. If anything, Telltale’s adventure gaming focussed line of games is picking up momentum, making higher profile games for more systems, like XBox Live, then ever before. If this was an experiment to gauge the popularity and potential of an adventure gaming revival, then so far the signs are good. Telltale has seen enough success from their efforts that they’ve been able to continue releasing games with progressively higher profiles, finally reaching the coveted Monkey Island license.

Add to that the fact that the current infrastructure of the gaming industry is actually quite friendly to the adventure gaming genre. In an earlier article we discussed XBox Live arcade games to look out for, and noted that many of them are smaller-budget, experimental games that simply wouldn’t be possible at a large gaming studio. With avenues like XBox Live and profitable Internet distribution now available, companies no longer have to make every game an enourmous, corporate affair.

Around the time of adventure gaming’s demise these options simply weren’t available. PC gaming had grown to the point where bigger budget games were becoming the standard, and technology was advancing to the point where a simple 2D game wasn’t as attractive as it once was, but opportunities for more modest productions simply weren’t available yet. Adventure games were stuck in an unenviable position: with their once almost universal popularity giving way to PC gaming blockbusters like Quake and Duke Nukem, adventure games lost the drawing power necessary to justify the budget and team sizes that were becoming the standard, yet no alternative was available. Eventually, adventure gaming just went away.

But nowadays smaller companies can afford to develop games that aren’t necessarilly going to be the next GTA. In other words, small games can be designed by small teams without a Hollywood-sized budget and still be profitable, because the developers can get the game straight to the audience at a reasonable price compared to some of gaming’s behemoth titles. Of course, this means that modern adventure gaming is, for now, inherently a more low key phenomenon than it was in its golden age. These games aren’t being released with the budget, marketing and hype that blockbuster titles have behind them, and their popularity will be reflective of that.

But of course, this smaller, indie platform that adventure games are taking advantage of is a lot more than the nothing that existed a few years ago, and adventure gaming’s popularity only seems to be growing, even if a redux of Monkey Island doesn’t immediately usher in a new era of adventure gaming dominance. The games are lovingly crafted by fans of the genre for fans of the genre, and enough of them are buying through avenues that a few years ago didn’t exist that the future is looking strong.

Who knows, if Telltale’s games keep growing in popularity then some time in the future we may even see a big name developer try to get in on the action and take on the adventure game genre once again. For now, the technological advancements that once spelled the end of adventure gaming are now giving it a second chance. It’s safe to say that adventure gaming has found its way back into the industry’s heart, even if it is only a small piece of that heart.

So is adventure gaming still dead? If it is, it’s been looking awfully lively lately for a dead man.

Last week Digg announced some important changes to the policies that govern what sorts of things third-party Digg application developers may do. The changes lift old restrictions on certain Digg app functionalities and present new options to developers, giving them the freedom and flexibility to create programs that interact with the social networking site in ways not possible before.

There are a few differences between the old Digg API and the new. First, developers no longer need to get permission from Digg to make applications that make use of the site’s content. Also, third-party developers may now charge for access to their apps and make use of ads. Essentially, third-party Digg application developers are now free to make applications on their own without oversight from Digg, while profiting from them, which means we can expect a lot more Digg apps competing for users’ interest in the near future.

Third-party developers now also have developer’s access to the Digg search engine, allowing them to make use of all the particular Digg search functions in their apps. Along with access to Digg’s search functions comes access to users’ favourites, allowing third party apps to make novel use of info about which stories are most popular among Digg users. Essentially, third party Digg application developers may now make use of the most crucial information about Digg stories, so we can expect plenty of applications in the future that give users new insight into the trends and popular topics of Digg.

Finally, third party Digg apps can now participate in Digg just like a normal user. Users may vote up , bury, comment on, and favourite stories through third party apps. Formerly third party apps could only watch the digging action from afar and were powerless to affect the Digg world.

The bottom line is that the new Digg API will allow for the creation of Digg applications that will give users a new level of interactivity with Digg stories. With unprecedented access to essentially all the information on Digg, it is easy to imagine that many apps will make full use of that info to glean as much of an understanding of the mysterious Digg popularity algorithm as possible, giving users the ability to understand and contribute to popular Digg stories more effectively than ever before. Applications like Sub Digger will no doubt benefit a great deal from the new API.

A couple questions arise about this change though. First, will this shift the balance between those users with a great deal of influence and the average Diggers? Digg has long had something of a problem with so-called power users. The idea is that some users have so many influential friends and such a tight grip on the pulse of the Digg community that the majority of their stories make it to the front page — the hallowed halls of Digg where continued success is guaranteed.

Sometimes this popularity is even detrimental to average users of Digg, who might post a story earlier than a power user, only to see that their own story has floundered while the power story has gained a truckload of diggs, due to the power user’s influence. For some it is a frustrating trend that runs counter to the communal, semi-democratic character of the social networking site.

It’s easy to imagine that these new developments to the Digg API could make the power users’ job even easier, further cementing their status as top Digg users. With applications that give novel, and possibly even better, access to and understanding of critical Digg information comes a better grip on control over Digg stories.

But of course this might work both ways. Average users will also have access to many of these apps, giving them the same competitive Digg advantage that the power users have, evening out any benefits gained. New third party apps might even give the average users, who formerly didn’t have much at their disposal to help them with getting digged up, a new tool to compete with power users.

It’s hard to say exactly what will happen, although I’m inclined to say that any advantages given will likely benefit the power users more than the average users. They are called power users after all, and are more likely to take full advantage of whatever is available to make Digging easier, while the average user is more likely to continue using plain old Digg as a simple pass-time, not worrying themselves with the complexities of the Digg hierarchy. But perhaps these new apps will make it easier for the average user to become a power user, giving them access to all the information and tricks that were formerly exclusive to power users. Only time will tell.

But the other obvious question is: will this make Digg profitable? This seems to be a conscious move on Digg’s part to open up the site to a wider market, essentially making a small industry in which developers can focus on making money off of Digg applications. This is reminiscent of the iPhone third-party app model, in which developers can make money for themselves while simultaneously increasing the desirability of the iPhone among consumers.

The short answer to the question of profitability, unfortunately, is no. The difference between Digg and the iPhone is that the iPhone costs money. Third party app development encourages people to buy the iPhone, whereas third party development for Digg will only encourage more people to use Digg for free more often. At best, third party developers will make money off these apps, but until Digg figures out a money-making strategy, which has eluded them until now, it will remain unprofitable.

But in the long term the answer is a bit more optimistic. Digg’s choice to make these changes to its API seem to mirror the strategy of the social networking powerhouse Twitter. Twitter has long allowed development of all kinds of third party applications, letting users make use of Twitter however they feel with whatever app they feel, not just through the Twitter site. Third-party Twitter apps are so integrated into the service that the submitted through X application signifier is tagged onto every post, allowing users to see what third party app was used to make a tweet. (I can’t believe I just wrote the word “tweet.” Forgive me.)

Essentially, third party development has allowed the outside world to improve upon Twitter, making it all the more popular. Mind you, Twitter has yet to make any serious money either, but building massive popularity and a cottage industry around third party Twitter apps can’t be a bad place to start when trying to become profitable. It would seem Digg is trying to do the same, which in the long run may pay off.

In the end, this is probably a smart move on Digg’s part. By making Digg more accessible, improvable and open, it is attracting not just more users who will make use of third party apps, but a whole slew of developers who will now be dedicated to working on the networking service while making some money of their own. Essentially, Digg will hopefully be able to build another whole community besides the one that already exists, out of application designers and marketers.

And if it all works out, we can finally see the website that brings us important news — like caterpillars who need a haircut — become profitable.

Sorry, that came off a bit rude. I was just trying to segue.

Left 4 Dead was one of last year’s most popular multiplayer games, pitting four survivors against the zombie horde in a post-apocalyptic world. With its wide popularity one would think that the announcement of a new and improved sequel would have fans excited, and without a doubt many are. But many fans are also downright rabid at the proposal of a new L4D. Rabid like the lifeless zombie hordes that yearn for brain matter.

I’m sorry, I did it again. Very unbecoming of me. I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand like that.

So what’s the deal? Why are the fans upset by the release of more of one of their favourite games?

Well, the fans are only angry because they love. They love L4D, and they want more of it. For free. The situation is not simple, but the problem seems to have its roots in a promise Valve made around the release of the first L4D. Valve claimed that they would consistently release free downloadable content for L4D, expanding the world with new levels and so on, in much the same way they’ve been doing for Team Fortress 2. Valve have made one free content update so far, adding a survival mode and some versus campaigns, but other than that the only new content fans have received news of is the not-so-free sequel. Cue boycott. Also cue shrill tenor note as decomposed hands burst through wall.

So what are the terms of this gaming resistance-movement? Lucky for us, the ravenous horde of almost 30,000 boycotters currently have something of a manifesto on the Steam forums, which explains their position.

So what do the disgruntled fans have to say? First, they make two acknowledgments: they recognize that Valve must make money, and that Judgment cannot be passed on the quality of Left 4 Dead 2 until its release, which is to say that the fans don’t really know if L4D2 will be worth what it costs until they actually get a chance to play it. Fair enough, you army of hungry zombie-gamers.

Now on to the good stuff: the accusations! The L4D2 boycott also plans to hold Valve to its promise of free downloadable content. The question of whether or not Valve has a duty to release free DLC depends on what the game was explicitly advertised to include and what the reasonable buyer would expect to get from it, and it’s hard to say whether Valve’s announcement of free DLC, which came after the release of the game, is part of those considerations. But it is safe to say that, whether or not Valve is required to release free DLC, it would be admirable of them to follow up on their plans and would leave a good impression on the mobs of bloodthirsty, groaning fans, whose arms are outstretched, reaching for more gaaaaaaames.

Is this whole fans as zombies metaphor getting old? I don’t care.

So far so good. But the L4D boycott makes another claim: that the release of L4D2 will split the online communities of L4D, making the online experience less enjoyable, and as such, Valve should not release L4D2 as a new game.

This is where things start to get messy, like the aftermath of a zombie ah forget it. You get the point.

First of all, if this is in fact a genuine concern, then the release of any sequel will result in community splitting. Stating that Valve should not release a sequel to a game, because doing so will reduce the quality of the online experience of its predecessor, is unreasonable, because it implies that game developers should not ever release sequels to online games. If reducing the quality of online play is something developers should not do, and releasing a sequel does as much, then developers shouldn’t be allowed to release sequels. This contradicts the boycott’s first acknowledgment that Valve is a company with financial needs and cannot be expected to survive without the release of new games. It’s also just clearly a bizarre claim.

This also doesn’t take into account the fact that the release of games from other companies can very well reduce the quality of online play by splitting communities. World of Warcraft split the communities of countless MMORPGs that came before it, lowering the quality of play for people who paid for an online experience with other games, but no developers were expected to somehow uphold the integrity of a gaming community, outside of making a place where a community can develop.

The fact is that the existence of an online community is not the responsibility of the developer of a game. Valve had a responsibility to make a playable multiplayer game with an interface that enabled players to connect –that is, they had a responsibility to facilitate a place for a community to develop– but no responsibility to somehow hold together a group of people. This is simply out of the control of a game developer, since things like the release of competing games, player interest, and many other outside factors will affect a community. A community is made up of people with the ability to make their own choices of what they will play, so it would be unreasonable to claim that Valve has a responsibility to hold such a thing together.

The boycott also claims that The announced content of Left 4 Dead 2 does not warrant a stand-alone, full-priced sequel and should instead become updates (free or otherwise) for Left 4 Dead. This is in direct contradiction with their acknowledgment that judgment cannot be passed on L4D2 until it is released. The simple fact of the matter is that no one knows yet whether L4D2 is a warranted sequel. We have seen a few screenshots and a trailer, but until people play it and reviews are released, the boycott cannot reasonably claim that L4D2 does not warrant a stand-alone release, especially when they themselves say that the value of L4D2 is as of yet unknown. The demand that L4D2 should be released as DLC is undermined by the fact that they simply don’t know what L4D2 will be like.

Finally, the boycott claims that L4D2 will make its predecessor obsolete. Again, this claim contradicts the earlier claims that judgment should not be passed on L4D2 and that L4D2 does not warrant a stand-alone sequel.

Again, the supporters of the boycott simply don’t know the quality of L4D2, and so can’t make claims about whether it will make the precursor obsolete. Further, if L4D2 is not warranted as a sequel to the first game –that is to say, if it is so similar to the first game that it should be included in the first game– it cannot make it obsolete; the sequel would have to be better than the first game to make it obsolete. Essentially, the boycott claims that L4D2 will be of such close quality to the first game that it shouldn’t even be a sequel, but also that it will be such a good quality sequel that it will make the first game obsolete. The boycott can’t have it both ways, but that is what they demand.

Just like a brainless zombie horde would.

Dammit, I did it again. Really, this is embarrassing.

Anyway, the supporters of the boycott are angry, but they’re also being unreasonable. They demand free DLC from Valve, which is fair enough, but go too far in demanding that Valve essentially never release a sequel to L4D. The only promise Valve made was to release free DLC for the first game, and as long as they do that they are free to make sequels as well. There is room for both, and the claim that Valve has a duty to not release a sequel to their game because they claimed free DLC would be available for it is quite a leap. It simply doesn’t follow that because Valve promised free DLC that a sequel is unfair or unwarranted.

In the end, the boycotters are free to boycott, and Valve is free to make a sequel and release free DLC for L4D. The result will be either that L4D2 is great and is worth buying, or it will not be worth buying and all the L4D1 players who boycotted it will be able to continue playing their favourite game with free updates. Everybody wins!

Except for those who have been consumed by the throngs of ruthless zombies.

With iGoogle Showcase anyone can take a look at the widgets and plugins that barely likeable celebrities like Al Gore, Demi Moore, Ashton The Kutch Kutcher, Martha Stewart, Ryan Seacreast, and others use on their Google homepages.

Mind you, use should be taken very lightly here.

At first I wasn’t sure what the purpose of showcase was. Then later on I figured something out: I still had no idea know what the point of iGoogle Showcase was. To be honest as of this exact moment I cannot clearly discern any sort of useful purpose for Showcase.

The thing is, there isn’t any obvious use for Showcase. Unlike some of Google’s other neat apps, like Gmail and Google Docs and SketchUp, which are all immediately useful in some ways, Showcase doesn’t provide us with any sort of tools or devices that make things possible. It doesn’t even provide something as vague as an e-solution.

Let me explain. Each Showcase page is ostensibly the personal page of a celebrity, implying that the widgets on it were chosen by a celebrity. That these pages are personal also implies that celebrities make use of them regularly, but that seems unlikely, given how they look like they were designed by a soulless robot programmed to mechanically coordinate PR initiatives.

Are we really supposed to believe that Kevin Rose has a Digg widget on his homepage, even though he owns the freaking website, or that Ryan Seacrest looks up American Idol updates, even though he is literally the first person on the planet to know when someone is voted off? That would be like Wyclef Jean looking for updates about the new album that he himself is writing.

Oh wait, that is already on his iGoogle page.

So are these actually the personal pages of celebrities? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that Showcase doesn’t have any point because it is just marketing. Each page is a thin veil of celebrity publicity, crafted to reinforce a consistent public image while covering some pretty clumsy marketing. Andy Roddick is a tennis player, so his page has a tennis ball. Rachel Ray’s page has a word scramble, because absolutely all stay-at-home moms in the universe like little daily newspaper puzzles. Al Gore’s page has Jon Stewart quotes because the hip, young, liberal demographic is into that.

The only page that looks like it wasn’t pieced together by an army of assistants is The Kutch’s. I mock the guy, but his page is a messy jumble of stuff that real people would actually use, like sports scores and dumb youtube cartoons, instead of a Punk’d widget and a picture of a trucker hat. But other than the Kutchster’s, every page is so generically representative of the public’s view of these celebrities that you can’t help but feel an advertising firm thought it all up while Keith Urban or whoever played golf on the moon while rolling in million dollar bills in a suit made of even more million dollar bills.

So iGoogle Showcase is basically just a cross-promotional marketing tool. That’s fine, and marketing has it’s place. Maybe someone will find a widget they like from the page of their favourite celebrity, or discover some news about someone they’re interested in. But let’s not pretend that these are actually the homepages these celebrities customized and use every day. The sites are such flimsy, cookie-cutter representations of the celebrities’ public images that insisting they are personal is only contrived and artificial.

So why even talk about Showcase if it’s so shallow and pointless? I will make a feeble attempt at answering this question. It seems to me that iGoogle Showcase is representative of a larger trend in which technology is suddenly very cool. Some might even call it hip if they are so inclined.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point tech and tech-culture went from being simply a useful thing for some and a geeky obsession for others, to the prime way for celebrities and public figures to garner some cred with fans. Between The Kutchinator running a competition with CNN to see who could reach a million twitter followers first, and news sites and blogs all over the web obsessing over whether or not Obama is a Mac user, you can’t seem to avoid the new-found trendiness of technology.

Even late night, normally a safe haven where fads and trends are mocked mercilessly, has gotten in on the act. If you can manage to stomach an entire episode of the Jimmy Fallon show you will be exposed to an incredible amount of shameless pandering to the technology crowd, and even Conan O’Brien, who I distinctly remember mispronouncing modem during an old episode, has a skit about twitter every night.

Some of this new focus on technology is obviously very good. Obama’s change.gov site, with its technological agenda, is leap years ahead of the technologically ignorant stone-age that was the last administration.

But I imagine not everyone will see it this way. It’s probably safe to say that many people out there hold a personal attachment to the nerd culture of technology, and many of those people understandably feel as if Hollywood is merely cashing in on their beloved sub-culture. Like someone who suddenly sees their favourite band go mainstream and finds that the music that meant so much to them on a personal level is now being eaten up by everyone in the world, geeks the world over feel violated by the commodification and abuse of their geek and tech culture by celebrities who are merely using it to get a bit more publicity.

The angst of geeks who are caught up in the new Hollywood obsession with their world was summed up pretty nicely in the response to the I Am a Geek video, released last month. Wil Wheaton, star of Star Trek TNG and famous hardcore nerd, was involved with the video and said of it that it seemed like a promotional opportunity for celebrities who don’t know a damn thing about our geek culture, which sums up nicely how most geeks feel about the new found celebrity status of geekiness.

In short, the sorts of celebrities that are featured on the iGoogle Showcase are the exact ones that nerds are shaking their fists at right now, damning them for invading their castle and abusing their culture.

I tend to look at it a bit differently though: being a geek is suddenly cool. Not just cool among an ever-growing population of geeks, but cool among people with a lot of sway, geeky or not. Further, geekiness is not just cool, but influential. Geekiness has become powerful.

I guess that “The Bible” thing was right; the geek shall indeed inherit the Earth.

(I apologize profoundly for that joke. Please don’t melt my computer with your nerd powers.)

With Activision’s announcement of the upcoming release of DJ Hero, featuring Jay-Z and Eminem, it looks like we are finally reaching the conceptual limits of the real-instrument-as-a-toy rhythm game, which is an exciting prospect for people who take joy in witnessing events of almost pure absurdity.

Even for those of us who love games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, there’s always been something just a little bit ridiculous about playing a fake guitar along to real songs. While the common internet troll’s cry of “get a real instrument” has always been an aggressive, narrow-minded view that ignores the fact that rhythm games are fun, there is perhaps a nugget of truth in their vitriol: learning to play songs on a real instrument is also fun, and everyone will think you’re cool if you can bust out a John Mayer song or some junk at a party. No one will think you’re cool if you bring your special edition Slash Guitar Hero controller to your friend’s get-together and start to fake-wail.

So with Guitar Hero we have replicas of instruments that can be used to simulate playing music. Kind of weird, but reasonable enough. DJ Hero on the other hand takes that dull point of weirdness off in the distance and makes it into a full-blown, retina-melting supernova. No longer will rhythm game players be using a replica of an instrument, but rather will be using a replica of a device used to play already-recorded music in the first place.

Let me elaborate. Want to play a song on guitar? You learn how to play a guitar. The mechanics of this are difficult, and so making a game that allows even the musically illiterate to simulate playing guitar is significant.

Want to play a song on a turntable? You put a record on the turntable and it plays the music.

I can’t stress this enough. In order to play a song with a turntable, all you have to learn to do is turn on the turntable. By playing DJ Hero, we are simulating the act of playing music on a record player. This is truly absurd, and also fantastic. As such, I predict that it is only a short matter of time before we start to see the most ridiculous of all instruments become the subject of rhythm games. What bizarre new depths will Activision bring us to with future instrument peripherals? The answers may surprise and disgust you!

So join me as we look at The Future of “Hero” Games!

Piano Hero

Appeal: The piano is a widely popular instrument used in everything from classical to jazz to pop, and as such the Piano Hero game is sure to be a success. But unlike guitars, which require strumming, and drums, which require hitting things, pianos only require that the player push a bunch of buttons. As far as I can tell, this is exactly how a normal videogame controller is used, which doesn’t exactly make a piano game controller sound too appealing. So, Piano Hero is going to need something to differentiate it from both normal videogame controllers and other rhythm game controllers.

How will Activision do this? That is a great question, fine reader, and I’ve got an answer coming straight at your question-hole right now: more buttons.

The standard guitar controller only has a wimpy five buttons, making it at best a dull abstraction of an actual guitar, and most drum controllers don’t even have cymbals or a high hat. The Piano Hero controller on the other hand will include a button for every key on the piano. Actually, scratch that. Piano Hero will just include an actual piano with the game.

That’s right, Piano Hero will be the first game with the balls, guts, and other anatomical stuff to push the rhythm game to its logical conclusion by going ahead and forcing the player to just learn how to play piano in order to play the game.

Too difficult? How about too awesome!? What could be a more immersive gaming experience than playing a game about playing piano with an actual piano? Nothing, that’s what. Well, except actually playing piano, I guess. Anyways, the goal of Rock Band is to make you feel like you’re a guitar player for once in your pathetic life, which is fun, so Piano Hero will maximize that fun by just making every Piano Hero player an actual piano player!

Okay, fine. Chruch ladies sometimes play more than just the piano

Even better, the programmers won’t have to fuss around with scaling every song down to an abstract level, because there will only be one difficulty setting: actual song.

Audience: Kids whose parents forced them to take piano lessons. Church ladies.

Tracks: I know we said that classical music and jazz are popular, but let’s face it, nobody who listens to that stuff would lower themselves to being anywhere within a 100 foot radius of a videogame. So, it looks like it’s going to be all Elton John, all the time.

Theremin Hero

Appeal: The theremin is a bizarre instrument that is played by not touching anything. This truly unique form of playing is the sole reason for  this unusual instrument’s esoteric appeal, since it sounds about as beautiful as an air-raid siren.

Unfortunately, this is a game, so it has to have buttons to press. As such, players will press a series of buttons on a normal videogame controller to manipulate a set of virtual on-screen hands, which will then move around within an actual 3D representation of a theremin. This a truly incredible advance that gives all the fun of playing a theremin while still being able to touch something!

But we couldn’t just stop there, oh no. The truly groundbreaking feature of this game is that it will require you to hold the controller in a theremin while you press buttons to manipulate the virtual theremin, giving the game an unparalleled true-to-life feel!

Audience: People who read Boingboing and like stuff that is weird for the sake of being weird, even though it is actually kind of awful.

Tracks: The sign-off tone of your local cable TV station.

Oh wait, this just in: the theremin has already been used by some nerd to play Rock Band. Ignore everything I just said.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OybiXxxkQG8[/youtube]

Bongo Hero

Appeal: Bongo Hero will be the first Hero game to allow you to tap into the exciting and visceral world of being that one guy on stage that doesn’t have a microphoned instrument, because why did we let him in the band again?

Oh DK, you shiftless hippie, what have you done with yourself?

In contrast with most instrument peripherals, the Bongo Hero controller will only include one button: a bongo. But this game will make revolutionary use of that one button. Rather than encourage players to go along with the song, Bongo Hero will reward players for a-rhythmically smacking the bongo controller while bobbing up and down and swaying around with their eyes closed, just like a real bongo player!

On second thought, this has no appeal at all.

Audience: Smelly hippies who always show up to the show incredibly stoned then bang on their authentic African bongos that they got in Capetown during their “humanitarian aid work-term,” where they were really just trying to pick up girls who wear hemp and have dreadlocks.

Tracks: Whatever music is being played where more than one person wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt can be found.

Katzenklavier Hero

Appeal: It’s a freaking organ made out of cats. The end.

Audience: Renaissance-era ADD patients, dog-lovers, the deaf.

Tracks: Jingle Cats.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPp0g0A_6x8[/youtube]

Hero-Game Hero

Appeal: Do you suck at rhythm games? Of course you do! Your hands have been permanently locked into wretched, clenched claws from carpal tunnel-inducing videogame playing and masturbation. As such you are never able to join in on the fun of a boisterous game of Rock Band, and are instead forced to sit back and make a feeble attempt at drinking a beer with your horribly disfigured appendages.

But have no fear, because Hero-Game Hero is here! (Oh.)  With Hero-Game Hero, players will get to experience all the exhilaration and thrill of playing a set, without the need for any of that physical proficiency stuff!

This kid is probably better than me, even when he is chewing on the controller

The gameplay mechanics are simple: just choose the difficulty you want to play the song at, then enter the skill level at which you want the song to be played. Want to experience the excitement of completing Through the Fire and the Flames on expert difficulty? Simply set your playing skill to little kid phenom and watch the points roll in! Want to suck really bad at Bark at the Moon? Just set the song’s difficulty to expert and your playing skill to toddler chewing on the controller and experience the agony and tears of defeat.

The game will even include a selection of playing strategies to highlight the tactical aspects of Hero-Game playing. Strategies will include: know the song before you played it in the game so you don’t screw up until you get to the bridge that no one cares about, try to get overdrive to go off by tilting the guitar as violently as possible multiple times only to have it not respond, making you scream at your TV when you fail, and hit the right notes at the right time instead of the wrong ones.

The ultimate goal is to become the best Hero-Game player ever, giving you the skills and talent to beat any individual rhythm game ever created!

Audience: People who like the idea of rhythm games but not rhythm, people with no hands, fans of meta-irony.

Tracks: Every song ever made! (Due to licensing fees, the game will cost 849 million dollars.)

It is widely advertised that the videogame industry seems to be recession-proof. While most people have cut back their spending on indulgences like vacations and eating out, the desire to satisfy the videogame indulgence is almost as strong as ever. Overall sales of videogames and videogame systems have only seen a relatively small drop compared to the significant hit that other industries have taken.

The strength of the videogame industry is not news to most people, but Jon Peddie research has thrown a bit of a curveball regarding this trend. According to their latest study, PC gaming hardware sales are holding up better than console sales.

This may come as a surprise to some people. While PC gaming will always be a strong industry, the release of next-gen consoles like the Xbox 360 has put a serious dent in PC gaming’s chunk of the market. Gone are the days when the PC had an exclusive claim to the best graphics, online play, and genres like the first-person shooter. Nowadays the console provides just as impressive HD graphics, online play, and much more affordable prices than the PC. If anything, many people would find reasonable the claim that the PC gaming industry has been losing steam compared to the booming sales of the console market.

So what exactly did this study find that has so defied our expectations? According to its own site, The Jon Peddie study is a:

unique analysis that does a bottom-up forecast of systems based on GPU and PC shipments, and a macro-economic top-down forecast based on the eco-demographics which covers 36 countries.

Oh. Okay.

There are at least a few hard numbers given by the study firm. According to the site, PC hardware sales only dropped from $20.07 billion to $18.65 billion in 2008, and the study’s forecast for 2009 predicts only a $1.4 billion drop, which is less than the forecast for the console market. According to Jon Peddie research, this shows the value customers place on the product.

Fair enough. But how did they come up with the numbers for this study? This is where things get a bit muddy. According to the study’s site, console sales include money spent on consoles, accessories, and a factor for HDTVs to play the consoles on. Likewise, PC sales include money spent on PCs, accessories, after-market add-ons, and a percentage for a monitor, since the same monitor might be kept through the life of more than one PC.

Right off the bat a couple of things about the study’s use of factors and percentages demand looking into. How much is the factor for an HDTV compared to a monitor? How many accessories are presumed to have been purchased for an avergae gaming PC compared to a console? How much after-market modification do they assume someone does to their PC? If the percentages for a PC monitor are higher than for and HDTV without good reason, for example, then the numbers could be heavily skewed; a small percentage multiplied over millions and millions of sales will add up to a very significant difference.

The study’s unexpected findings are made even more incredible with a forecast that predicts that PC gaming sales will reach $30 billion in 3 years. Despite the current recession. And despite the fact that PC gaming hardware has caught up to the demands of most games and most PC gamers don’t need or want enough super-cutting-edge hardware to warrant such a massive boost in sales. At least some people might think this, without having a look any real hard numbers related to the PC and console gaming industry.

Unfortunately, there are no readily-available hard numbers, and also no answers to our questions, because the specific details of the study are not open to the public. All we are given is a somewhat half-hearted attempt at an explanation for PC gaming’s supposed market strength. Jon Peddie Research states that:

The conclusion the researcher at JPR have come to is that people are staying home more, less movies, less dinners out, postponed vacations, and turning to other forms of entertainment. PC Gaming is a very economical form of entertainment, a $50 game can provide hundreds of hours of play, and it’s not uncommon for players to replay a game. Also, purchases of a PC for gaming can be shared since the machine can be used for watching (and creating) videos, as well as office work and web browsing, something consoles can’t offer.

But this is a bit of a non-answer. A $50 dollar console game can also give hundreds of hours of play and replay. Further, consoles can and are used for watching movies. My household has all but written off the DVD player, opting instead to watch movies through the Xbox 360. Finally, gaming PCs being used for office work and web browsing does not account for sales of things like gaming accessories and high-end graphics and memory sales; any PC can be used for such things, and PC gamers are not going to spend more on gaming-related hardware as a result of their computer being able to do word-processing.

Overall, this study seems to hit us with some counter-intuitive conclusions. The signs are out there for anyone to see: console games are more popular, affordable, and powerful than ever, whereas PC gaming has fallen from its former days of gaming supremacy. Yet JPR’s study apparently found otherwise.

Is JPR’s study skewed towards giving the PC gaming industry a favourable look? Were more accessories and costs figured in for PC gaming than console gaming, and was there justification for such a choice? It would be nice to see the details of the study and find out, but unfortunately a copy of it costs $5000.

If consumers are willing to pay a price like that for a JPR study, then apparently the PC gaming industry isn’t the only one doing unexpectedly well.

DOWNS: Some puzzles might be a bit tough for XBLA players who are unfamiliar with adventure gaming; version we played had some bugs that are hopefully all worked out in the final version.

BOTTOM LINE: A must-buy if you’re a fan of old-school adventure games or Wallace & Gromit, or if you’re just looking for a game to test your brain rather than your reflexes.

Available on PC and XBox Live Arcade, the first episode of the new Wallace & Gromit game brings players some light-hearted fun in the same vein as old Lucasarts and Sierra games, and is sure to please fans of the almost-extinct adventure gaming genre.

Based on the innocent and entertaining animated claymation shorts from Aardman Animation, Fright of the Bumblebees is the first in series of episodic games released by Telltale Games. For those that aren’t familiar, W&G is an animated show about Wallace, a bumbling, air-headed inventor of ridiculous contraptions, and Gromit, the dog who begrudgingly puts up with Wallace’s hair-brained schemes and does his best to keep his owner out of trouble.

Like all Telltale fare, such as the Sam & Max series and the Strongbad games, W&G is an old-school adventure game in which you collect items and use them to solve puzzles. For some reason this style of gaming has fallen out of favour since its heyday almost two decades ago, but Telltale is looking to bring it back into the mainstream. And more power to them I say; it’s always bewildered me that adventure games went out of style so badly, and I believe the adventure game genre is one in great need of a revival.

And with W&G, Telltale Games have done a fine job at bringing back this classic style of gameplay. Like any good point-and-click-style adventure game, W&G gives you a problem to solve and a few seemingly useless items, and forces you to put on your thinking cap and come up with a creative solution to the unlikely problems you are faced with.

The game is easy to get into, for adventure gamers and newbies to the genre alike. The player is introduced to the mechanics through a quick tutorial, and the controls, though not standard point-and-click adventure controls, are simple and will fit the XBox controllers very well. The tutorial, controls, and inviting style of W&G make it very easy to jump in and start playing.

The world of W&G is a perfect fit for the adventure gaming genre, with its light hearted characters, silly jokes, and wealth of crazy inventions to centre puzzles aronud. Whether you’re trying to figure out how to make a special flower-growth formula from rag-tag ingredients, or trying to shoot giant bees out of the sky with a porridge gun, W&G surprises you with creative solutions to problems that make you say “Ah-ha!” while also making you smile as the whimsical events unfold.

I don’t want to spoil anything by giving away too much of the story, but the basic premise of the game is that in his quest to deliver a truckload of honey to one of his customers, Wallace unwittingly releases an army of giant bees on his quaint English town. To get rid of the bee menace, players will use both Wallace and Gromit to solve some smart and challenging puzzles.

The story is classic Wallace & Gromit fare, and any fan of the cartoon will be very familiar with its playful style and fantastical hijinks. Telltale has managed to capture the feel and style of the Wallace & Gromit cartoon completely, with the result that playing the game is basically just like playing an episode of the show. From the characters and voices and animation style, to the very good direction and cinematic style, W&G draws the player into the game’s world and its story. Particularly entertaining is Wallace’s walking animation, in which he constantly holds his hands in front of himself like an overly-polite British person who is in a hurry but doesn’t want to bother anyone else by showing his anxiousness.

W&G also presents some unorthodox and interesting puzzles to the player, keeping the game fresh and compelling. For example, when Wallace first unwittingly releases the giant bees, the player gets the chance to shoot them out of the air with a porridge gun. But what at first looks like a straightforward reflex mini-game actually turns out to be unique puzzle that strays from the usual adventure game formula. W&G does this a few times, making the player think outside the box in order to solve some puzzles that diverge from the usual use-item-on-object formula of old-school adventure games.

The early version we played had a few bugs, which will presumably be ironed out for the final version. Also, despite W&G’s very light and charming style, some of the puzzles can actually be a bit difficult, especially for someone who just downloaded the game off XBLA and isn’t familiar with the adventure game genre. The light and cute style of the game may give people the impression that this will be a simple game, but that would be a mistake; many of the puzzles require a sort of creative thinking that most games wouldn’t involve.

But overall, if you’re a fan of old-school adventure or Wallace & Gromit, or you are just looking for a game to test your brain rather than your reflexes, or you just want a hcange of pace with an innocent and fun stroy, then Wallace & Gromit, Fright of the Bumblesbees is well worth your time. Though the game is technically the first episode of four, it actually includes a surprising amount of content. As a fan of adventure gaming, and Wallace & Gromit, and good games in general, I’m looking forward to the next episodes.

Wallace & Gromit, Fright of the Bumblebees is available on XBox Live Arcade and PC, and costs $34.95 for the entire 4 episode bundle.

Strawdog Studios are the makers of the upcoming XBox Live Arcade title Bounce, which we wrote about earlier in an article about 9 XBLA games to watch for, so we can most likely expect Turbo Duck to be a light-hearted and enjoyable game.

Turbo Duck will be Strawdog’s first foray into the iPhone/iPod touch world. In it, players will control Turbo Duck, a duck that can turbo, not surprisingly. The goal is to guide Turbo Duck through a bathtub obstacle course in a race against time.

Of course, Turbo Duck will make use of the iPhone’s unique accelerometer and touch screen controls, allowing players to navigate Turbo Duck into flags, which give you extra time, and around hazards like toy boats and mines, all by tilting and touching the iPhone.

According to the Strawdog press release, Turbo Duck will include:

20 Levels of bath-time fun
Bobbing boats
Submerging (and surfacing) submarines
Exploding mines
Bonus Bread (Ducks like bread!)
and more…..

Overall, Turbo Duck sounds like it is going to be a silly and fun game that is perfect for the iPhone, giving players a light and entertaining game with simple but fun mechanics.

After Turbo Duck is released, iPhone gamers can likely expect more Strawdog games on the Apple hardware. According to Dan Marchant of Strawdog Studios, “The guys in the office think the iPhone is a great piece of technology and a fun platform to develop games on. Turbo Duck is our first dip in the iPhone pool but certainly won’t be our last.”

Turbo Duck will be available in English, French, Italian, German & Spanish for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. It will be out at the end of March 2009 priced at $1.99 / £1.19/ ¢â€šÂ¬1,59.

Recently my computer began to have some serious performance issues. Starting it up took an obscene amount of time, to the point where my computer still wasn’t usable after I went to make an entire plate of waffles for breakfast. Firefox took a full ten minutes to load, graciously giving me plenty of time to tear my hair out and hit my monitor in rage, and my machine would labour intensively at the most simple procedures.

I started to worry that my computer might be infected with some of those “viruses” I’d heard so much about, so I went about trying to get rid of them. After several full scans of my computer’s entire hard drive and running memory, multiple spyware scans, and a great deal of booting from safe mode and investigating the task manager, I decided I had done all I could. Yet only one apparently benign virus had shown up and been dealt with, and my computer was still running like glue dipped in tar encased in cement.

Then I noticed it: a program related to my McAfee antivirus was constantly increasing in memory size. Could my antivirus software have a memory leak? Could the culprit be the very thing that I thought was on my side? With few options left, I took the risk and deleted my entire McAfee package.

It wasn’t easy, because McAfee fought me the entire way. It required that I download some obscure uninstallation program, even though there was already an uninstall in the add/remove programs menu, and it told me many times that I couldn’t uninstall some files because they were still on the computer, which is pretty much the most absurd, frustrating thing a program can tell you. Uninstalling McAfee required just as much effort as deleting the most stubborn spyware.

But lo’ and behold, after deleting McAfee my computer ran flawlessly. No more slow downs or memory leaks or waffle breaks while I waited for the Start Menu to show up. After my horrible experience with this antivirus package, I started to wonder: are big-name antivirus packages worth it any more?

Tech Crunch recently ran an article that brought to the Internet’s attention a strange Symantec-related program called pifts.exe, which seemed to be performing some shady operations. Posting about the application on the Symantec forums resulted in deleted threads and banned accounts, which raised some serious suspicions in the online community.

Was this just a mistake, a series of coincidences, or some sort of conspiracy? It is of course difficult to say, but whatever the case may be, the situation doesn’t exactly give a good impression of Symantec’s service. This is because the pifts mini-scandal reminds us that big-name antivirus software companies are in the business of making money, and just because their programs are supposed to help defend our computers from threats doesn’t mean that those big companies aren’t above sneaking in their own spyware-like programs into the mix. If a company like Sony is apt to do these sorts of things, there’s no reason to think that Symantec or McAfee aren’t above doing the same.

None of this means that Norton, or any other antivirus software, is actually actually sneaking computer-destroying malware onto our computers, but it still brought me to ask this question: is it worth it for me to have big-name antivirus software on my computer if it can be more of a nuisance than the viri it protects me from?

The answer for me has been an unequivocal “no.” McAfee rendered my computer into a machine that had the performance of a profoundly retarded rock, and was just as much of a pain to uninstall as the most tenacious malware. In the past I found that antivirus packages like Symantec’s were intrusive and annoying, constantly bothering me with pop-ups, making computer games crash, and identifying all the wrong programs as threats. Further, if the pifts situation is any indication, Symantec’s software may not be the best choice for users who want to keep mysterious applications from messing with their machines.

The bottom line is that I want my antivirus software to make my computer-use worry and bother-free, which is the exact opposite of what all big antivirus software has done for me. Big-name antivirus has been nothing but a bother for me, and there’s no point in using it if it is just as much, if not more, of a nuisance than most malware.

For now I’ve resorted to using AVG antivirus, because it’s free and seems to do the job. Whether this will hold up is another question, but the reality for me is that big-name antivirus is unnecessary and annoying, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others felt the same way.

Of course, like anything on the Internet the Infinity Ward suggestion feed is pretty much entirely composed of horrible garbage. (Actually, like everything on the Internet, even this article is mostly made of horrible garbage. I apologize.)

The result is true unintentional hilarity, in the form of nearly unreadable posts asking for more flaming attack dogs and laser-tipped bullets.

So join me as we take a look at what the Internet thinks CoD Modern Warfare 2 should be like!

When u get a sniper headshot the killcam should follow the bullet in slow motion and u see ur gamertag on the back of it sick idea rite – realfun7188

u shud be abel too get spining rims for ur bullts to if u get enuf kils in a row am i rite? sik.

How about a layered missile defense perk where you can’t get hit by airstrikes? – xbenxspire

Yeah, well your layered missile defense didn’t work, because I used the laser shield! The only thing that can beat a laser shield is a laser, loser! Nya nya!

Another cool thing is when you get 10 kills in a row, u could call in a laser from in space on a certain point in the map. – xbenxspire

Oh, well I’ll be damned. Touche.

when one gets a ten or 15 kill streak, a gas bomb should be release to wipe out the other team. – ctwotimes

I also want to be able to bind a button to the genocide command so that I don’t always have to go into the menu to find it.

i would to see some online achievements so that there will be something to play for something getting so many kills ?? plz reply – dellacapo

Don’t worry, dellacap. I will plz reply.

What you wrote makes absolutely no sense.

Is it possible for you guys to do these two things? Indestructible environments & open-world maps, while maintaining the linear? – ZakiZakaria

Woah there, Zaki! Indestructible environments!? I don’t know if you even understand what you’re asking of us. Scientists predict that indestructible environment technology is still decades away from being feasible, and even then it would be so unstable that only science experts could harness its incredible power without blowing up whole cities.

And don’t even get me started on the linear.

there should be different knife options…like a battle axe. – antmansbigxmas

War truly is hell.

Could we get a +3 Plate Mail perk while we’re at it, too? That black dragon in the level where you have to save the hostages in the American embassy always kills me with its magical poison breath.

perks to set up fake dummies to distract the opposition(possibly in perk1 catogory) – DeAnO987

also a perk were u swing a paint can down the stairs and hit burglars in the head(possibly in macaulky kulkin catogory)

Official paintball mod -DarthCvrnda

What? This game is already basically just a game of paintball that requires a $300 console instead of a bunch of sweaty friends. All you do in it is simulate shooting guns at each other without hurting anyone. (Unless you get hit in the head, of course.)

But if you want to you can squint really hard and pretend the M16 that you’re spamming has a hopper, and that the blood splatters shooting out of xXxMuRdErCyDexXx are just vegetable oil and red food colouring.

design ur own camo colours for ur own guns, like a pink sniper! – Sacred_Flea

A pink gun? I don’t even have to make a joke about that. Thanks Sacred_Flea.

like the zombie mode, i would like to see a terrorist mode. hordes of crazy terrorist come at you along with RPG’s and suicide bombers – macfoshizzle

That is incredibly tasteless in ways I cannot begin to describe. You should be proud that you are truly unique, in that you are the only person in the world who thinks this is a good idea.

Al Qaeda zombies would be cool. They could have bombs strapped on at level 30 – xbenxspire

Okay… That was unexpected. And depressing. Let’s move on, shall we?

i would like 2 kill plenty of towlhead terrorists – vidprodoug

I SAID LET’S MOVE ON YOU SOULLESS WEIRDOS.

INFINITY WARD THE BEST. TREYARCH SUCK!! – Mick1888

Sorry, that’s a statement. In order for your submission to be acknowledged it must be written in the form of an incredibly insulting, badly written suggestion. Thank you for your interest in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

people who use jugger should get a message in the mail in red and white giftwrap and wen dey opin it says fuckin jugger noob.fuk you.. – realfun7188

Much better. Thank you for your excellent suggestion, realfun7188. We will immediately reallocate all of our resources towards implementing this idea.

And Micki1888? You could learn a thing or two from this guy about how suggesting works, jerk.

Well, that was horrible. And the best part is that these terrible, unfathomably crappy nuggets of depravity are literally constantly rolling in, so for all we know the worst is yet to come.

Have a good day!

Jason has made a name for himself as a primary figure in the growing movement of art-games. Passage garnered a great deal of attention from all corners of the Internet when it was released, and his fifth game, Between, was hosted by Esquire magazine in conjunction with a biographical article about him.

Jason’s latest game is Primrose, a compelling puzzle game that departs from the games-as-art debate.

How would you describe Primrose, for anyone that hasn’t heard of it?

Primrose is a tile-clearing puzzle game.  It’s in the same family as Tetris, but it has completely new mechanics that have never been seen before.

How long did Primrose take to complete?

About two months.

Primrose’s visual style is very simple and appealing, yet effective. What was the inspiration behind this style?

When I began testing Primrose’s mechanics, I saw some pretty complex behavior emerge.  It felt like the output of some kind of alien computer, and I wanted the game to feel and sound like you were poking at such a device.  I looked back to how computers were depicted long ago, with grids of glowing, pulsating lights and bleeping sounds.  There were also linear elements in the display like the grid, the text, and so on. I wanted these to all look like something that was actually being drawn on an old vector display.  Everything fades in and out very smoothly, and overlapping colors blend together at the edges.

Especially on the iPhone, I thought it would be nice to hold a computer like this in the palm of your hand.  I wanted people to look over your shoulder while you played and ask, “What’s that?”

Primrose is a bit of a departure from your other games, in that it isn’t obviously “about” anything. What made you decide to make a straightforward puzzle game like this?

I saw it as a challenge.  I wanted to push myself outside the area that I was comfortable working in.

People often talk about Tetris as being a perfect game or one of the best video games of all time.  They also describe it as a mysterious stroke of genius, never to be equaled or surpassed.  I wanted to try my hand at making a game like this—not a copy of Tetris, but a game with captivating, deep mechanics that could have a very long play life.

I also wanted to make something that was more appropriate for extended play on an iPhone.  My art games can each be played a handful of times at most, and though they might inspire interesting thought, the majority of people do not feel that they’re worth paying for.  The market really values games based on total playtime.

Do you plan on making more games like Primrose?

To make Primrose, I started out with an in-depth study of existing puzzle games to figure out what makes them work.  I came up with a pretty simple list of key design principles that they all seem to follow.  Primrose was the first game that I made using these principles, but there’s a huge space of other possible games out there.  I have at least one more in mind that I would like to make at some point.

Are you currently working on any new projects that you would like to let people know about?

I’m currently still perfecting Primrose, with input from the public as they hammer away at the leaderboard servers.  I have no idea what I will work on after that.

Your games often have a simple graphical style that is pixelated but also soft; the far left and right sides of the screen in Passage illustrate this style well. Where does this aesthetic come from, and why did you choose it?

For as long as I’ve been developing games, I’ve been interested in visual anesthetics that look computer-generated in some way.  My early games used procedurally generated graphics, which gave them a very unique look.  With Passage, I tried my hand at pixel art, and I really liked the results.  Here was something that clearly looked computer-generated, but was still representational.  The characters and other sprites in Passage had just enough detail so that you could tell what they were (a man, a woman, etc.), but they were abstract enough to leave lots of room for imagination and personal connection.  The guy in Passage didn’t look like anyone in particular—in fact, he could be you.  This is like a kind of digital cartooning.  Scott McCloud talks a lot about the emotional power of abstract cartoons in his famous book Understanding Comics, so I don’t need to go into more details about it.

As far as the softness goes, that is like my modern, high-tech take on pixel graphics.  Historically, on systems with very limited color palettes, pixel sprites had a static look.  Modern systems have huge
color palettes, and that makes smooth color blending and other effects possible.  The pixels are still sharp, but the colors on the pixels can vary smoothly.  It’s a bit like zooming into a 32-bit photograph: sharp, blocky pixels, but with lots of smooth color variation from pixel to pixel.

You often include an interesting musical aspect in your games. Between and Gravitation in particular use music in an interesting way, by giving cues and adding layers as the player progresses. How important of a role does music play in your game-design?

Almost all of my games have had dynamic music of some kind.  Passage was the only game that had a static musical score.

I’ve been playing and composing music for my entire adult life, so I have the ability to create my own music for my games instead of outsourcing that task.  However, static music does not fully exercise the capabilities of our dynamic medium.  We expect the graphics to tie into the gameplay, so why not the music?

My first game, Transcend, had you composing a novel piece of music as you played the game.  From there, it was natural to try to figure out how music could be dynamic in my subsequent games.  Passage was made on a tight schedule for a specific event, so I simply didn’t have the time to do something more elaborate with the music.

I found that Passage and Gravitation both presented me with at least one particularly powerful moment, but I imagine that other people who have played your games have had very different experiences than me. For example, while playing Gravitation, a friend of mine did something with the blocks that I never considered, and I’m still not sure whether they were meant to be used in that way. How much do you intentionally plan the player’s experience, and how much is left up to the player to determine as a sort of unintended, happy accident?

In games like Passage and Gravitation, I tried very hard to limit the possibility of too many happy accidents. The problem with accidents is that, though they may be interesting, they might mesh with the interpretation of the game in a strange way.

With Gravitation in particular, I designed the entire map with a specific kind of progression in mind.  It’s like a series of small lessons that helps you learn about various consequences of the game mechanics as you go along.  For example, you first encounter a single block by itself, and this gives you a chance to see what happens with one block without needing to tackle the more compensated interactions of multiple blocks just yet.  Later on, as you jump higher and higher, you encounter more blocks in different configurations.  What happens when you drop a stack of four?  What about a stack of six?  There are a bunch of interesting consequences, and all of them hopefully have meaning in the context of the game.

Your games often include very basic game conventions, such as scores and time limits, but they aren’t the main focus like they would be in a game like Pac Man. What’s the reasoning behind including mechanics like these?

I want to make it clear to everyone that I am indeed making games and not some form of less specific interactive art. To be a proper game, you have to be able to win or have some other metric of success. Score is a simple way to do this, and it is also a way of directing players toward a certain style of play.  It’s like me saying, “I was hoping that you would consider playing in this particular way.”

A time limit was very natural in Passage, but was less so in Gravitation.  Still, I found a timeline to be a powerful design tool, since the balance could change subtly as time in the game progressed, highlighting different features of the mechanics and new shades of meaning.

Between, Jason's fifth game

Many of your games are very  challenging, but not in the way games are traditionally challenging. They aren’t difficult in the way a game like Contra is, for example, but rather ask a lot of the players conceptually and force them to figure out things  on their own. For example, Between demands a great deal of consideration on the part of the players in order for them to make any progress at all. Do you worry that this might scare players away, so that some might not ever even get an impression of the game?

Passage was meant to be accessible to almost anyone. Between was designed with a completely different audience in mind: for the people who really liked and understood my previous games and wanted to see me really push the boundary hard.  I hope that these people will give me the benefit of the doubt.  First of all, they will need to spend about an hour with Between before they get much out of it.  That alone is a huge barrier for most people.  After that, they might need to think pretty hard before they can piece together the parts into a meaningful whole.  A handful of reviewers have done this successfully, so I know that it’s possible, and that’s all that matters to me.

As for everyone else, well, Between probably just isn’t for them.  For example, I still have not shown the game to my spouse.  She is generally not interested in games, and I can imagine the experience just being frustrating for her.  Also, I never agree to play Between with someone who is looking to try it.  Playing with me would spoil the experience. So if someone like my spouse really wanted to play, she would need to find our own play partner—yet another huge barrier to entry.

Many of your games, such as Passage and Gravitation, are very quick, only taking up a few minutes of the player’s time. Is this a conscious decision, or just a result of material limitations? Do you plan on ever making a longer game?

Between is my take on a substantially longer game.  Note that it does not last longer because I chalked it full of “content,” but simply because the gameplay takes longer. Most video games waste substantial amounts of the player’s time, repeating the same thing over and over again, and padding the experience with cut scenes.

With Passage, I could express everything that I needed to express in only five minutes.  I originally planned on making Gravitation five minutes long also, but as the mechanics developed, I realized that five minutes was just not long enough for players to encounter everything that I wanted them to encounter.  I tweaked this a lot, and found that eight minutes was just enough time to try all of the interesting block configurations yet never see anything boring or repetitive.

Braid is an example of what I see as the upper limit of how long the game should be without any filler.  Four hours, five hours, that’s pretty long.

You’ve given explanations for the inspiration behind games like Police Brutality, Perfectionism, Passage, Immortality, and so on, and those games seem to draw directly from your experiences. Your latest game, Between, is a bit more mysterious. Can you give an explanation of its inspiration, or would you rather it remain mysterious?

With Between, I really wanted to tackle something more difficult and subtle.  All of my previous games were pretty simple both in terms of their interpretation and in terms of what they were about.  If I wanted to, I could describe what they were about on paper pretty easily. Immortality is the only one on the list that tries to reach a bit higher.

After playing Braid and thinking about it a lot, I came to understand that Jonathan was reaching for something huge with it, something that he couldn’t quite get his arms all the way around.

That’s an interesting thing to do with art, and almost a necessary thing, because if you can easily put it into words, what’s the use of making the art?  We really need art to help us express these things that
we cannot express in any other way.  That seems to be purpose of art. So I set out to make a game about something like that, about something that I couldn’t quite corner and collar.

I came up with what I wanted to express pretty quickly—it was something that I’ve been thinking about for most of my life.  It touched many different areas of human experience, like a many-tendriled manifold of ideas and emotions.  The hard part was turning this manifold into a game design, and I really struggled with it for a long time without any lightning bolts.  Finally, I forced myself to go out in the woods, and I sat on a rock with my notebook, determined to come up with a design. Fortunately, I was able to channel lightning that day, and I came home with a design for Between in my notebook.

I read that Between was influenced by the philosopher W.V Quine. Is philosophy an interest of yours, and do you find that it influences your games?

Yes, I have been interested in philosophy for a long time.  Between was the first game of mine that really addressed some more difficult philosophical issues directly.  Of course, it’s not hard to see that the rest of my games have a kind of existential bent, but that is more like pop-philosophy than anything else.

What sort of videogames did you play growing up? Have any of them stuck with you, so to speak? Is there any you would consider your favourites?

Like most 31-year-old males in America, I played a lot of videogames when I was growing up.  From the Atari 7800 through the PlayStation 2, I had love affairs with almost every system that was released.

After all that, a game that still sticks in my mind is the first Legend of Zelda—something about the mood was very special.

What games, if any, do you play now?

With my game design work and my responsibilities as a parent, I have very little time to play games these days. I try to keep up with what is going on in the art game scene as well as I can. Other than that, I usually wait for mainstream games to become classics before I spend time on them.  I recently played Shadow of the Colossus, for example.

I still play German board games whenever I get the chance, which is unfortunately not very often.  I also dream of beating my cousin at Age of Empires 2 someday.

Gravitation, Jason's fourth game

How did you get into making videogames?

I’ve been programming actively for the past 12 years.  A video game is actually one of the more difficult things to program, so it took me a long time to get to the point as a programmer where I felt that I could really pull it off.  After programming a relatively elaborate and successful peer-to-peer system (MUTE), I felt like I was ready to make a game, so I made Transcend.  I submitted it to a few festivals, and it got rejected.  A few years later, I work on Cultivation, which was more ambitious.  It got rejected by one festival and accepted by another.

A year after that, I made Passage, and I got swept up by the tide.  The last year and a half of my life has been spent doing nothing but game design.

What made you decide to start making videogames as art?

I was interested in making art from the beginning, because it felt like there were very few videogames that were that ambitious, but I really didn’t know where to start.  Transcend looked very “artistic,” but it really wasn’t a vehicle for any kind of expression.  After that, I read Raph Koster’s book A Theory of Fun, where he discusses how games can be art.  That book was hugely influential for me, and with my next game Cultivation, I pretty much applied his formula directly: permit more than one right way of play and encourage players to reflect about the choices that they make.  Along the way, I discovered that meaning could be carried directly in the emergent behavior of game mechanics, but I didn’t recognize the potential of this capability at the time.

After I played Rod Humble’s game The Marriage, I began thinking more about using expressive mechanics directly.  That lead to the creation of Passage, and I continued pushing in that direction all the way through Between, my twelfth game.

On your Arthouse Games site you have people like Rod Humble and Danny Ledonne giving their definitions of art. Could you give us a one-sentence definition of art?

A work is art if expression is its primary reason for existence.

With that in mind, what would you say it takes for a videogame to be art? What makes one game art, and another not?

Taking my definition and applying it to games differentiates them pretty well, I think.  Which games are primarily about expression?  Which games are primarily about entertainment?  But even among those that are primarily about expression, there are different places for the expression to lurk.  If the expression is primarily present in the cut scenes, then the expression is not very game-like.  I’m much more interested in works that express things in game-specific ways.  Other mediums found their artistic legs by honing their own expressive strengths.  We should too.

Are there any other videogame designers that you would consider artists, or games that you would consider good examples of art?

My short list these days is Jonathan Blow, Rod Humble, and Daniel Benmergui.

(Editor’s note: We talked about Daniel Benmergui’s game I Wish I Were the Moon in an earlier article. I Wish I Were the Moon can be played for free on Kongregate.)

The definition of art in general, let alone the definition of videogame art, seems difficult to pin down. Even on the Arthouse Games site the few definitions range from the wildly inclusive, such as Nick Montfort’s citing of Scott McCloud’s definition, to the very particular, such as  Raph Koster’s definition. Is our difficulty with agreeing on what exactly counts as art in videogames impeding progress? Or does it even matter?

Lots of people like to dismiss arguments about the definition of art as ridiculous, but I think that these discussions do matter.  I think they matter a lot.  Some people say, “Humanity has been arguing about a definition of art for centuries.  What makes us think that we will come to any consensus now?”  So they want to give up.  But if humanity has been arguing about art’s definition for centuries, that must mean that definition is really important and that the discussion is really worth continuing.  It’s like arguing about love, or death, or God—the most difficult topics are always the stickiest, but I don’t see how ending the discussion is going to help.

So, let’s keep hammering on that definition of art.  Let’s try to make progress where others have failed.

And yes, I think that games have been hurt by not having a very clear direction to point when they want to be art.  A lot of designers say, “Art?  What is that, anyway?” and then just go back to making
meaningless, shallow games.

Primrose, Jason's latest game

One interesting difference between videogames and other art forms is public presentation. You can go to a gallery to look at paintings, go to a show to watch a band, or go to a theatre to watch a movie. Even novels and poetry, which are usually solitary experiences, have libraries and public readings. At the moment it doesn’t seem obvious that videogames have a counterpart for this; there isn’t a lot of opportunity for public, social displays of videogames. Do you think videogames need public presentations like this to develop as an art form?

I actually think that video games don’t perform very well, compared to other mediums, in public settings.  Every “exhibition” of games that I’ve seen has been awkward at best.  Games are interactive, so you really can’t do a screening. You have to set up terminals where people can walk up and play.  What do other people in the room do while one person is playing?  Watch over the player’s shoulder?  That’s not an ideal experience of the game either.  We can watch a movie together and look at a painting together, but we can’t really play a single player game together.

There are other options for massively-interactive exhibitions, but they are pretty heavy in terms of technology requirements.  For example, you could convene an audience in a theater setting, but require that each person in the audience bring their own laptop.  Then you could pass around a portable hard drive with the game on it so that everyone in the room could install the game and play it in parallel.  Jonathan Blow tried something like this a few times with his Nuances of Design session at GDC.  But even this solution isn’t perfect, especially when you’re dealing with a longer game.  Are people really going to sit there for four or five hours to play a game like Braid?  Imagine going to a film festival and only seeing part of a movie.

Thus, I think games are best experienced on our own time, and not in a public setting.

Passage, Jason's third game

And that concludes the interview. Many thanks to Jason for answering so many questions!

All of Jason’s games are available for free on PC, Mac, and Linux, and Jason’s newest game, Primrose is also available on iPhone for $2.99.

But let’s face it: the most fun in the game is the epic bails. Everyone loves seeing that virtual skateboarder slam into the ground at speeds that break the sound barrier, so we’ve collected some of the most entertaining crashes, bails, slams, accidents, and crazy glitches we could find!

And here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

I was THIS Close

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDybCqW_6eI[/youtube]

CLOTHESLINE!!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ6lhC3xzS4[/youtube]

I Don’t Even Want to See What Happened Earlier

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_R9JUzaTBw[/youtube]

Always Remember to Wear Your Helmet Kids

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO9YAl184-A[/youtube]

I Fought the Law, and the Car Won

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ara60tkMglM[/youtube]
“Why is this car going so slow? Speed up! You’re going too OH MY GOD NO”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3nXDCF2ZAQ[/youtube]

They Have to Stop Cleaning Those Windows so Well
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAc6Gwcx-A[/youtube]

If You’re Going to Fall That Far, Might as Well Make the End Quick

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX6CRqk-n-Q[/youtube]

Face, Meet Rail
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s52o55YkIxk[/youtube]

Excuse Me, Your Face Is In the Way of My Foot

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXL0xg_9Hw[/youtube]

“Oh my God, look honey! An icecream stand! Let’s get around this body that just fell from the sky and bounced around like a superball and get some!”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOIut51P80Q[/youtube]

Ouch. OUCH.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne2UtPJYmFc[/youtube]

“Oh, today’s sesh was also bad. I ended up flailing around wildly and launching through the air again.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4emZDxf2mY[/youtube]

It’s Not the Fall That Hurts, It’s the Slamming Into a Railing With Your Spine at Terminal Velocity

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Ro_FFy4hw[/youtube]

Learning How to Properly Distribute the Impact is of Crucial Importance
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8he2BxR3ZfI[/youtube]

Face, Meet Metal Girder
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p96LlrxIdfw[/youtube]

I Swear to God it Was Like it Was Happening in Slow Motion
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiQlSI7Eqfk[/youtube]

Actually, It’s Not the Fall That Hurts, It’s the Slamming Into the Pavement So Hard that Your Spine Bends Backwards

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPGPohpK1FI[/youtube]

At Least That Fence Broke His Fall (And Body)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzcyQZMevhE[/youtube]

Somehow he Lived Through the First Impact, But He Made Sure the Second Counted

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMkDLbz0d1s[/youtube]

The websites we’re about to look at it aren’t necessarily supposed to be examples of the best websites ever; rather they are meant to be examples of sites that do at least one thing particularly well. These sites could be almost any site at all, because almost every site has some aspect about it that can be learned from.

Finally, some of these pieces of advice will overlap, but that’s just because it’s such great advice that you should hear it twice. Also all of this advice isn’t meant to necessarily be used at the same time on the same site, because, well, we can’t have everything we want.

And without further ado, here are the sites!

KINEDA.com

I’m not exactly sure what this site is about; it seems to basically feature hip-hop fashion news and other trendy stuff. But it doesn’t really matter what it’s about, because it’s clean and sharp design immediately drew me in and made me want to start clicking on things.

The interesting thing is that Kineda essentially seems to be just a wordpress blog, but that does not hold it back from being a fantastic design. Its use of high-quality pictures and a simple design, with a solid, readable font,  straightforward white-on-black background colour scheme, and newspaper-like columns makes the focus entirely on the content, and not on anything that the reader shouldn’t be interested in.

The result is that the site has a look very much like that of a magazine, which naturally makes visitors to the site want to dig in and start reading. Just like in a good magazine, nothing gets in the way of the visitor’s experience with the content.

The Lesson: You don’t need crazy-fancy web design to have a great site; a simple wordpress blog with a bit of thought put into presentation can do wonders for the visitor’s experience.

Also, even though print magazines and the internet are two different mediums, there are always lessons to be learned from print when designing a site. Magazines and newspapers have been around a lot longer than the internet, and many of the basic lessons learned by magazine designers are transferable to the world of the web: use columns for readability, include a good amount of high quality pictures to break up the text, and choose your font well for maximum readability.

Finally, pictures of hot Japanese girls never hurt.

NARROWDESIGN.com

This site is a good example of how to make an appealing style of navigation. It’s also a good example of a site that is different and interesting, yet still completely focused on the content.

The main content of the site is a series of links to sites designed by the owner, which is pretty standard. But what is interesting about the links is how they are presented and how the user navigates through them: by simply moving the mouse the links scroll up and down.

This unique method of navigation immediately puts the focus on the links, which is how it should be, considering they are the main content of the site. The user simply can’t ignore them, because upon first moving their mouse they see the links move; the visual cue to pay attention to those links is immediate. This kind of navigation is also very intuitive, making sure the visitor isn’t confused at all by the somewhat unusual approach.

Also, when a link is clicked on, the user isn’t immediately sent to a site; rather, a preview of the site is shown. By getting previews of the work the visitor gets an idea of the content, while still having the opportunity to stay on the main site and play around with the navigation system.

The end result is a site that the user will most likely start using right away, with no other cues than the unique navigation style.

The Lesson: Thinking about how users navigate your site can be very important, and giving visitors a particular way to navigate can bring more focus to your content, whether it is composed of text, pictures, movies or links.

And you don’t always need a flash site to take advantage of navigation; most of the time visitors will just be scrolling up and down and clicking on links, but there are still design decisions to be made. Want everything to be one screen? Then you’ll most likely need links to navigate the site, while not cluttering your screen with too much text. Want users to scroll through your site? Then keep links to a minimum, and what links you do have should open in a new tab, because losing your place on a long webpage and having to scroll back can be annoying.

By putting a bit of thought into how you want visitors to navigate, and a bit of planning and design to support that vision, you can make your site that much easier for visitors to use.

LEGWORK STUDIO

I usually don’t like sites that have a lot of weird stuff going on in the background; they tend to be confusing and end up scaring me away. But this site managed to hold me in just long enough for me to click on the about button, which scrolls you down to a cleverly embedded video that looks like it’s part of the background.

I’ll admit it, this video is pretty much the only reason this site is on the list. Not to say that the rest of the site is poorly designed; it is perfectly functional, stylish site. But the video in particular was entertaining and funny, and managed to draw me in while explaining what the site was about with a ridiculous cartoon. Further, it didn’t feel like a tacked on gimmick, because of the way it was featured seamlessly in the site.

The result is a fun use of media that is not only entertaining for anyone that visits the site, but that also lets visitors know what the site is all about without boring them to death.

The Lesson: Don’t be afraid to get creative with different types of media to get visitors engaged. Movies, music, and sound aren’t always going to work on every website, but if it is an option then with a bit of ingenuity and some smart integration of the media you can make what is normally a boring affair that users might ignore into something that is engaging and fun. The internet is capable of so much more than just pictures and text, and smart use of these possibilities can make your site that much more engaging.

YOULOVE.US

First of all, this site has a really cute name. I’m not sure how much that’s worth, but it can’t hurt.

Right off the bat this site looks like a pretty design with a full background image of a nighttime cityscape, but doesn’t immediately blow you away with anything amazing. But as soon as you scroll up or down or click on a main link, the website does a very cool effect where the movement of the background gives the impression that the time of day is changing in the little cityscape.

The effect is interesting and engaging, but not distracting, since the buildings in the background stay in place, acting as a visual anchor so that the site doesn’t give that nauseating feeling that most full-scrolling-background sites give. Also, the site makes great use of colour, managing to change the background colour from dark blue to bright red without making the text unreadable.

The result is that you don’t even have to care what the site is about to stay around, because you want to keep exploring it to get more of the unique and attractive scrolling effect. And the better chance someone has of sticking around at your site, the better chance they have of getting into its content.

The Lesson: Keep visitors interested with whatever you can. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter how relevant the interesting aspect of your site is, although ideally it will be with something that gels well with the overall presentation and content of your site.

And you don’t have to come up with a groundbreaking new clever design to do this; a catchy title, a funny picture, some pretty colours, or anything else that might catch a visitor’s attention will help keep them around long enough to let your page make an impression.

VIGET LABS WEB DESIGN BLOG

This site is a simple blog about web-design, fittingly. It’s got the usual setup, with blog posts, an about section, comments, and so on.

What makes this site worth talking about is how nice it looks. It has a beautiful watercolour background that blends with the blog perfectly, and is just plain easy on the eyes. The colours used are soft and inviting, and this theme is carried through to the rest of the site, which can be seen in the pictures of the various editors, which have the same mild, faded style. The end result is a website that is a pleasure to look at.

The Lesson: If you have the resources to do it, make your website look as nice as possible. Some people might argue that information is information, and that it shouldn’t matter how many nice frills your site has, as long as it gets the points across. But the simple fact of the matter is that most people like stuff that looks nice, and a pretty looking webpage with some attractive graphics — even on something as simple as a blog — just gives visitors one more reason to stick around.

MAGNIVATE

Magnivate is a pretty unusual site: it is almost like a video game, in that you get to explore a little world with a character that you control. It’s a fun and interesting approach that will most likely get any visitor immediately involved with its interactivity.

But the epxloration you do on the Magnivate site isn’t just about exploring the strange little world you are presented with, because by getting your character to run around, you also end up learning what the site is about. As you reach certain points, information about the site is presented to you, making what would normally be dry and boring info become a quick and fun game.

By giving the visitor a fun way to find out what the site is about, Magnivate skips the whole boring about page that no one cares about, and instead integrates exploration of the site into the exploration of the game.

The Lesson: Try to keep things organic when explaining to any visitors what your site is about. A small about section doesn’t hurt, but ultimately you want people to naturally figure out what your site is about while exploring it, so that they aren’t forced to swallow any information about the site without first experiencing what it’s like first hand. When visitors interact directly with the site in learning about it, they build a much stronger connection with it than if they simply memorized a block of text explaining what it’s about.

Of course, you don’t need to take the same route as Magnivate; its flash-based approach takes the exploration-as-information idea to a very literal conclusion, but it’s far more elaborate than is appropriate for most sites. Nonetheless there are ways to make sure that users get an idea of what your site is about without first needing an explanation.

For example, make sure to give the user plenty of options in exploring the content of your site, so that no matter what they click they’re getting content that the site is focused on, and not periphery stuff. A lot of blogs do this well, by not only showing the latest blog posts up front, but by also giving the archives or last month’s posts in a sidebar, or implementing an option that allows users to access a random post. With lots of different ways to get to the same content, the user will quickly figure out what the site is about just by clicking on stuff.

TED.COM

Ted.com is a site meant to showcase various talks given at TED conferences. The site actually has quite a few things going on, with a fair amount of links and options that the user might take some time to become familiar with.

Nonetheless, TED’s main focus, the videos, is undeniably the first thing any visitor will notice. The central feature of the site is a neat visualization of various categories of videos, and it presents the visitor with an interface that immediately asks to be investigated. By making the video visualization feature so prominent, TED gives the visitor direct access to all the videos, and also organizes them according to a number of interesting and intuitive themes, making the visitor comfortable to dive in and get acquainted with the site’s content.

The end result is that, even though TED has a fairly busy design with a good deal of periphery information, most visitors will ignore all that info and instead make use of the much more intuitive visualization feature.

The Lesson: Your site’s content must be the main focus at all times, because it is what the visitor is there to see. If anything gets in the way of that, then the visitor’s focus shifts away from the content, and they may lose interest or miss the point.

Make sure that every design choice you make puts your content, whether that be articles, movies, music, or pictures, front and centre.

WEB ZEN

Web zen is a site that lives up to its name quite well: it is sparse and straightforward and keeps features to a bare minimum, letting nothing get in the way of the content, which consists of a themed set of links to interesting stuff.

It might almost seem ridiculous to have a webpage with so little on it, but the result is a very focused design. There is no explanation of what the site is about, but there doesn’t need to be, because the content is right there in front of the visitor. With no ads, blocks of text, or distracting graphics to get in the way, web zen loses no time in getting the visitor to start digging in to the site.

The Lesson: Keep things simple. You don’t have to be as minimal as web zen, of course, but the basic design principles it embodies are important: if you have ads, make sure they don’t get in the way, make sure nothing that isn’t the main content is distracting, and if you don’t need it on there, get rid of it.

The challenge is balancing simplicity with the other important features included on your site: the more features you add, or have to add, the more complex the site becomes. But with a bit of organization and some smart cuts, a simple design that ensures the visitor doesn’t get confused, lost, or frustrated can be achieved.

With Primrose, set to be released on Feb. 19th, Jason Rohrer takes a step away from the games as art debate to bring us a game that’s just a game –  a compelling puzzle game.

Probably best known for Passage, a game about the inevitability of death, Jason Rohrer has made a name for himself as a primary figure in the growing movement of art-games. Until now his games have essentially been an experiment in artistic expression through game design, exploring themes like regret, death, and creativity with basic game mechanics.

But Primrose takes a break from the debate with some unique puzzle gaming in the same vein as Tetris. Like most good puzzle games, the idea behind Primrose is simple: your goal is to accumulate points by surrounding blocks of one colour with blocks of another colour on a 7×7 grid. When a group of blocks have been surrounded, they disappear, giving you a certain amount of points depending on how many blocks were collected. Then the surrounding blocks are changed to the colour of the blocks that were eliminated.

But like always, it’s not quite as simple as that. Blocks are given to you randomly, two at a time, and must be placed in a particular order. So, you might get an orange block and a green block and be required to set down the orange block first. Further, the second block of a pair must be placed in the same row or column as the first block. This restriction adds depth to the game, forcing the player to come up with a particular strategy for block placement to ensure that no blocks are placed where they can’t be used.

Finally, combos can be achieved to multiply your point total when eliminating blocks. Through strategic placement and planning, the colour changes that occur when you surround a group of blocks can be used to eliminate multiple groups of blocks. For example, when a group of green blocks are surrounded and turn their surrounding blocks green, those newly-green blocks may complete the surrounding of another group of blocks, which will also be eliminated for even more points.

The combo technique is of course the key to getting a high score, and success depends on the player’s development of various combo strategies; anticipating colour changes and careful placement of blocks is central.

Like any good puzzle game, Primrose is easy to get into but difficult to master, and presents the player with some simple mechanics that blossom into a difficult problem as higher scores are strived for and more blocks fill the screen. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that new colours are introduced after a certain amount of moves, increasing the complexity of the dynamics between the blocks considerably.

The game is quite challenging, but of course most puzzle gamers wouldn’t have it any other way; the best puzzle games present us with an essentially unsolvable problem that will keep even the most expert of players coming back for another challenge, and that is exactly what Primrose does.

Primrose also features some very clean and simple graphics with no clutter and plenty of soft, bright colours. The result is an interface that is reminiscent of a computer console from a classic sci-fi movie, with big bright buttons and lights. The sound effects reinforce this look, with different retro-sounding, synthesizer-like tones that accompany the placement of each colour of block.

All of this adds up to a very clean, simple, and presentable game that is easy to get into. I played the PC version of the game, but you can tell it is clearly optimized for the iPhone; the iPhone’s touch controls should be completely intuitive in Primrose, and the style of gameplay is perfect for a quick game while trying to kill some time waiting for the bus. Further, the game presents the player with no fluff, meaning iPhone users will be able to get straight into the game with the tap of a finger.

Overall, Primrose, while not being a groundbreaking title by any means, is a great example of very solid puzzle-gaming that will be right at home on the iPhone or any PC. It’s very tightly-crafted, and shows a great understanding of gameplay mechanics and the way they interact to make a compelling game.

It also shows that Jason is not only an artist, but also has the chops to make some addictive and professional-quality entertainment as well.

Primrose is set to be released February 19th for iPhone, Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux.