Since the first one of these went well, why not a second?

Brenda Brathwaite, game designer and professor of game development at SCAD, has seen the future of gaming on Facebook. And it’s a bit shit. Her post on looks at the four new titles from H&R Block to appear on the popular social network and paints a grim picture of what could be waiting down the road. There’s a lot of talk about Facebook and the ease with which developers can create applications for it being a new frontier for gaming, and I think that’s true – just look at the immensely successful and fun Scrabulous, or the simpler Warbook, or the flood of invites in my Facebook mailbox to play the interconnected games of Slayers, Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies, despite my already having an army of damned. Advergames can work just as well as any of these on the service, but dreck like H&R Block have thrown up there is only contributing to the application spam already threatening to render Facebook completely useless. Brathwaite’s dissection of each title is superb, isolating the simple yet fundamental flaws that result in the creating a massive unplayable mess. Favorite line: “All they had to do was take Jetman and reskin it, or any of the other games that follow the old Helicopter dynamic. Maybe it’s more artful to reinvent the wheel wrong.”

Now for a pallette cleanser: Kieron Gillen has written a rather ace round up of this year’s Independent Games Festival finalists, including the remarkable looking World of Goo and Audiosurf. This year’s crop of titles are the best bunch I’ve seen in a while, with each game offering not only a unique experience from its fellow nominees but from pretty much any other games you can think of. While most of these games aren’t readily available, there are playable demos for most and gameplay videos of others. I briefly mentioned the IGF finalists last week, but Gillen’s piece on them is one of the best breakdowns of what makes each game special I’ve seen so far.

Personal favorite site Rock Paper Shotgun has both the press release and an explanation of what could potentially be huge news for PC gaming from Valve: the publisher/developer/generally lovely people have announced the release of Steamworks, a “complete suite of publishing and developing tools” that gives anybody who wants it access to the powerful resources of Steam, Valve’s digital distribution system. With Steamworks, publishers and developers can take advantage of Valve’s unparalleled piracy protection, voice chat, stat tracking, and automatic updating. And all for free. This could very well be A Big Deal, as Steam is pretty much already the de facto leader in digitally distributed games and this can only see the service showing up on more machines.

Gamasutura featured this week an opinion piece by Nayan Ramachandran titled Controls, Simplicity, Focal Interest, and Contextual Sensitivity. It’s a nice breakdown of what developers take into account – or rather, should take into account – when it comes to determining how the player will interact with their games. While not quite as deep as I’d like (but then, player interaction is one of those things I’m sorta-kinda obsessed with), it covers ground you don’t often see discussed when it comes to player interaction, including the importance of control sets that match the mood of their game. Regular readers might have noticed that accessibility in games is something of a minor crusade for me, and Ramachandran’s article is thoughtful look at the first and most important point of entry for every player – what to do with their hands.

And this last one’s more for me than anybody else. It’s a fantastic analysis of an idea put forth by game designer Ralf Koster in both his book A Theory of Fun and a lecture given at GDC in ’05. Here, his grammar on soccer is used to break the game down to a series of causal chains. It’s a fantastic way of planning out a game – determine your objective, and then work out what has to happen to achieve it. Livejournal poster Psysal’s breakdown of its merits is simple and elegant, much like Koster’s book itself. Definitely the sort of thing that needs to infect my thinking more regularly.

Filed under: link roundup, talk about games