A mixed bag this week, as only a couple of these can be lumped in with the various gaming curios I usually link to here. The rest are more research for That Next Thing I haven’t had a chance to talk about further, and while all great in their own right may not be as interesting to most as they are to me. Still, you could do worse to follow them.

First, the always-fun Gamesetwatch has a new piece from Leigh Alexander up – ‘The Aberrant Gamer – Completion Anxiety Disorder’ is a thorough look at the paradox of why, when so many people demand next-gen games be longer to justify their price tags, so many of us rarely finish them. She runs the gamut of most likely suspects, including the time sucks that come with adulthood and one of the worst offenders: poor game balance. I can’t count the number of games I’ve run through at an easy clip only to smash into a wall of difficulty at the very end. Difficulty spikes can be fun, but there are so many factors to consider when using them (how much harder the game is getting, is the player immersed enough in the game to want to push through any frustration the spike causes and get to the end, etc.) that the smart choice is often to avoid them entirely. It’s a great piece, one that should be read as much by players as it should be by developers. (via Gamesetwatch)

Last week, Link Roundup favorites Rock Paper Shotgun posted links to videos of Warren Spector interviewing some of the bigger names in game development as part of his Master Class in Video Games and Digital Media at the University of Texas. I completely neglected to include them in last week’s post, as I’m a bit dense, and now the videos have all vanished. Luckily for human society in general, the magical interwubs have thrown them back up in the form a 3 GB torrent. While I imagine things are going to get a bit on the technical side, they’re well worth watching if you’ve any interest in seeing one of the more innovative game designers the medium has ever seen pick the brains of other really smart guys (including Ultima creator and daddy of the MMO, Richard Garriot). You can grab the torrent here. (via RPS)

And now for the more obscure stuff, the purpose of which I promise to explain at some point: First, the excellent Come Out & Play festival returns to New York City this year for another weekend of turning large chunks of Manhattan into a playground. Registration isn’t up yet – they’re still taking applications for games to play – but you can join their mailing list and be notified of when they’re accepting players. If memory serves, it’s a free event and well worth your time.

Spinning out from that is Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost’s Cruel 2 Be Kind, the big hit of CO&P ‘06. It’s a self described “game of benevolent assassination” played outdoors in a wide space with natural boundaries (for instance, half of Central Park). Based on the popular game Assassin (usually played on college campuses), players set out alone or in teams to hunt down other players and kill them with a particular act of kindness from a list distributed a few days before the game begins. An interesting twist is added in that you don’t know who else is playing, meaning you’ll spend a good bit of time being nice to complete strangers in hopes that they’ll fall over dead. There are lots of good ideas here – I particularly like the one about assassinated players joining up with the ones that killed them – and I’m really hoping they play again this year.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Streetwars, the more traditional game of assassin played by a couple hundred people over three weeks in a city. No word yet if they’re coming to New York this year, though I’m not sure if I’d play if they did – while the first game I played was one of the more defining moments of my time in games, pushing me into wanting to make them full time, the second was a disappointment, an expensive, disorganized mess with little of the magic of that first, smaller-scale game. Still, the idea behind it all is sound, and I can honestly say you haven’t lived until you’ve run from one end of the city to the other with a watergun concealed in your jacket, eyeing everything that moves out of fearful anticipation for the moment when the person with your name steps out of the shadows. At its best, Streetwars is a game that can completely change the way you look at the city around you, turning even your mundane walk to work in the morning into the best stealth game you’ve ever played. I wish I could play every month.

Finally, a somewhat awkward web version of analog game design smart guy James Ernest’s article from issue eight of Make magazine, ‘Homebrew Game Design’ it’s a great piece, outlining Ernest’s personal approach and a handful of the mechanics that make up a great many board and card games. To read, just click on the page you want to zoom in. Particularly handy when trying to think in terms of creating rule sets with no immediate visual feedback. (via Make)

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