Abrupt Goodbye

Collaborative story telling

Abrupt Goodbye is a collaborative chatting game released by an indie game studio. The whole thing is browser based and all of the content is user generated. I think that it's possibly a first foray into a entirely new type of game.

The premise is supplied: A blind man is waiting for a train, a woman approaches him and talks.

Abrupt Goodbye is cool for a number of reasons:

- It is infinitely replayable - each completed game extends the content of the game a little bit, so the next game is longer and more varied.

- It's totally asynchronous, but puts two 'sides' against each other. Each side is several players working together without communicating.

- The system is set up to be self-improving - as you choose your conversational options, you vote for the most interesting ones. So there's a constant positive reform going on there.

You can crowdsource communication the wrong way, (as with some blog comments), or you can do something really great with it, like Abrupt Goodbye. Go play, it rules.

Hypercapitalism

'Hypercapitalism' is so poorly defined that the first google search result isn't a wikipedia page. That's sad, so I'm going to put a solid word out there.

My new definition: The idea that the purpose of capitalism is to supply goods and services to the net benefit of society, and that business is a vehicle to apportion those goods fairly. (See also: corporate responsibility, conscious capitalism)

Dio Games, an indie software venture operating out of Romania, has a very novel game called Orbital Trader that has an excellent and intentional bent towards the hypercapitalistic. You see, in the present, one amasses great wealth by supplying goods and services. In the future, it's really much more profitable to do that in a way that helps people. Commerce is no longer a chimera that beats people into the ground; nor does a ruling class decide how to wreck things for society. No, now the economy and all the players in it are scrambling to fill needs, invest in the greater good, and be proper stewards of the markets they're in.

Give it a try, it's a really cool game.

Project of the Week: DM's iPhone Helper

Dungeon Masters, take heed:

The DM's iPhone Helper is here to assist you while you're generating adventures. Enjoy!

More on Developers and Games

Hilarious:

The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.

Also, I forgot one of the present's best developer/game designers: Kory Heath. His website is lots of fun, go read it.

Game Design as Programming

What is it about game design that lures software developers? Both are geeks, to be sure, but there seems to be a special draw that somehow grabs hold of both.

Andrew and Kristin Looney are good case studies to start with. Before starting their own company inventing games, they worked as as computer scientists at NASA. The love of computer science is evident in their games, which are rife with simple mechanics that end in beautiful systems of input and output.

Richard Garfield, designer of Magic: The Gathering and other wildly popular thinking games, also began as a Bell Labs scientist. Magic's inventive abstract system of interaction between cards was completely new at the time, but appeals to many - Garfield's game is absurdly popular around the world.

Paul Sottosanti is a php developer-turned Magic-designer turned game-developer. His latest work, Tiny Adventures, builds cleverly on the new paradigm of social networking games.

There are a lot more examples of software devs-turned-board game developers, but take these clever people as examples to start with. Common geek-appeal aside, what is it that draws programmers? The game as a microcosm of reality with its own rules, structures, and beginning and end seem common to all four of our cases. Software is similar in its use of interconnected modular parts. The shared Ludism and limitless exploration potential of programming languages and games is equally likely.

Thoughts?