Balthazar Auger

Z-Rox is a 1-dimensional game. But it is also not a 1-dimensional game.

The premise is to guess invisible objects seen through a thin line that scans up or down. I suggest you go play it (it is a good puzzle game, gets your brain going) and then come back for the rest of it.

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“Gameness” is a very empirical concept and as such it might be hard to measure, but I believe that by following the progressive evolution of a system, we might pinpoint the moment it goes from being a non-game to being a game. If we identify the precise circumstances where this happens, we might learn something about the nature of games! Who knows? (more…)

Space is the most logical constraint to consider after time. It is also one of the most obvious constraints I might talk about, due to its widespread use.

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Time has long been thought as a negative constraint to game development. Huge, multi-million dollar productions sometimes last for 3+ years and still manage to feel incomplete at the end, sometimes even requiring a patch to run properly. The general assumption is that more time and more money will forcibly yield a better game. However, this is periodically proved false.

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Seeing as the conditions at the IGF pavilion weren’t optimal for poesysteme-ing, I decided to go towards the “performance” approach and have every visitor collaborate to create and maintain a poesysteme every day. The game only got rebooted when the game crashed and at the end of the day.

People could add one or several words and see how they would trounce or get trounced by the other words that were there already there, adding their contribution to the gene pool. Before they left, I asked them if they wanted to adopt a word, based on a “Love at first sight” algorithm. Upon seeing a word they liked, they were asked to write a quick sentence depicting what the word meant.

Their collaborative efforts result in this dictionary of the absurd.

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