Expertologist » Opportunities For Play

OFP: The Beginnening

chrislamb — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:24:04 +0000

So the plan is for Opportunities For Play, the whole game-in-a-week experiment I first talked about here, to start next week. It’s massively bad timing, with with milestones on both games I’m working on due that Monday and a few dozen other things that need as much of my attention as I can give them, and there’s a panicky part of my brain begging me to reconsider. After thinking it over for the last week or so, though, I’ve come to realize there’s no such thing as a convenient time. Everything about this idea defies convenience – if I did have the free time, I’d probably spend it plopped on the couch rewatching Buffy or picking my way through Jade Empire, leaving the game till the last minute and forcing it to be finished in a frantic rush. This way there’s still the frantic rush, but it can be spread out over a few days. No, really, this is a better idea.

In the meantime, I need a fishbowl. The idea is for each game after the first one to be built around a theme of a single word (“gravity”) or a short sentence (“Where did you leave it?”), providing me with both a direction to think in and a challenge to overcome. While I am clearly super clever and have a few ideas for themes already, any and all suggestions are welcome. Toss any ideas you might have in the comments and they’ll go into the fishbowl just as soon as I have one.

This is going to be fun.

Opportunities For Play: Statement of Intent

chrislamb — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:32:52 +0000

So the Thing I’ve kinda-sorta talked around for the last couple weeks is this: I want to make games that can be played as part of daily life, integrating themselves seamlessly into your walk to work, time spent waiting for the check at the diner, train ride, or whatever else you happen to be doing. Quick and easy to play, with simple rules and little or no equipment needed, they should ideally be the sort of thing you begin playing by deciding to play. You make a choice while coming out of the station at 14th to start following a certain set of rules, and suddenly your walk to work is a little more interesting than everyone else’s. Provided they’re not playing as well, of course.

Taking a page from experimental-game-a-month guy Petri Purho of Kloonigames (and having finally read the same excellent Gamasutra piece that started him down this road a year or so ago, ‘How to Prototype a Game in 7 Days’), there are certain rules this project is going to follow:

Each game will take a week to make. Each prototype should be “done with bugs” in seven days. The rest of the month can be spent testing and tweaking, if necessary, but the heavy lifting should be wrapped up.

Each game will be based on a theme. At the start of each project (except for the first one), I’m going to draw that game’s theme out of a hat. If you’d like to suggest something, drop it in the comments for this post.

Each game can be played in the real world. Each game should be something you play in physical space, either alone or with others. They don’t have to be outside – if I can make a card game, I’d love to – but the idea of changing mundane spaces into games is one of the prime motivators at work here.

Each game will be available to play once it’s complete. Games are meant to be played, so after each one is wrapped up the rules you need to play it yourself will be posted here under a Creative Commons license or something similar. Even the bad ones. Which leads nicely into…

Failure is an option. This is less of a rule, and more of a mantra for myself – I have a whole crippling fear of embarrassing myself in public thing going on, and this is the next step in the on-going struggle with it. Even bad games can lead to better ones down the road, and nothing helps me think about what works better than seeing what doesn’t.

And that’s it, mostly. More rules may come as they become apparent, but for now I think that’s a pretty solid base to launch from. I don’t know if this sort of things needs a name, but the phrase “Opportunities For Play” has been rattling around in my head since the notion first struck, so why not call it that? It’s as good a name for what I’m hoping to create as anything else – I’ve been more than a little in love with the French Situationist idea of the DÃ©rive for a few years now, and this is just another way of rethinking the way people use the urban spaces around them. I’ve no idea where it’s going to go, or if it’s going to work at all, but even watching it all crash and burn is such a better alternative to just sitting on the idea that there’s really no choice at all. The first game, the one that started this whole thing, starts soonish. Watch this space.

What’s Next

chrislamb — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:53:01 +0000

It probably wasnâ€™t terribly clear (particularly as my methods of thinking out loud are baffling and needlessly complex even to me), but there was a theme to nearly all of last weekâ€™s posts: â€œworking stuff outâ€. Deciding what to do with the restless frustration that keeps me moving from game to game, considering what can result from reconsidering an old game into something familiar but new, and even setting down what I consider to be a game (or at least a first pass) â€“ it was all part of figuring out what comes next. Not career-wise â€“ my job is awesome, as is the company I work for and the people I work with. Iâ€™m talking on a broader, more life-long scale. While beginning to move back into pure design from production (more on that much later, probably) is providing me with more outlets for the aforementioned frustration, itâ€™s not quite enough. I need more than outlets, I need challenges to push at the boundaries of both how and what I think about games. In short, I need to start making them on my own.

Thereâ€™s a slight problem, of course: I have no ability when it comes to creating art assets and am pretty much useless at programming. The former I have friends I can guilt into helping with, and the latter I intend to start teaching myself on the weekends, but that doesnâ€™t solve the immediate problem of wanting to start this erm, immediately. The solution didnâ€™t hit me until this morning while I was out running, and it was so obvious I nearly crashed into some old lady who was just out minding her own business, oblivious to the risk of idiot game designers careening towards her: I can create rule sets. Not all games need art or code to run, nor do they need to exist on a computer screen.

More later when I have the time. Stuff, she is happening.