I came across a message board post today involving someone from a Greek casual game company looking to start working on their first adventure game. In a seeming attempt at gathering data as to what elements they would include in such a game, this individual decided to poll an audience of adventure game fans as to what they love and hate about the genre. Of course, people started to respond with things like “I love a good story and good puzzles” and “I hate puzzles that don’t make sense”, and while I agree with them for the most part, I have this strange niggling feeling that everyone’s missing the point.

This is how I responded:

But wait! There’s more…

What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed is one of those games that I immediately placed on my imaginary “Must Play” list upon its release, but never really got around to playing for the longest time, for some unknown reason. Well, last night, I finally got around to playing the game, partly being inspired to do so by my colleague Gunnar Harboe’s glowing review over at Adventure Gamers. And I was definitely impressed.

Linus, for the uninitiated, is a Nintendo DS-inspired split screen affair where you essentially play two seemingly unrelated stories at the same time. It also consists of one rather difficult logic puzzle; however, unlike many adventure games I’ve played, the puzzle actually is the story, rather than an obstacle to it. Furthermore, said puzzle actually required me to do some quality thinking rather than simply guessing. It’s been quite a while since I’ve played an adventure game where I actually enjoyed the process of solving the puzzle enough to not be tempted to consult a walkthrough.

Even though I myself am gravitating away from writing puzzle-heavy games, it makes me happy to see that other people are actually doing them well, and in new, original, and, innovative forms. Linus is definitely an example of interactive art at its finest. Whoo!

Today, I was fascinated to notice that in a forum thread I read on whether people’s avatars in online games looked like themselves, more than one woman who posted said that hers did look like herself, except “in better shape”, whereas I didn’t see any men claiming the same. [1] Aside from making me even further indignant about women, by and large, being taught to hate their bodies, this got me thinking about how I myself select player characters when given a number of choices.

It’s quite rare that I specifically create my player characters to look exactly like myself, particularly when there’s the choice to look like an awesome green-skinned alien or whatnot, but I do feel that the characters I choose tend to represent how I perceive myself in essence. However, one commonality I find is that I specifically avoid stereotypical thin, delicate female characters. I’m pretty sure that this has a lot to do with the fact that my own body is short, thick, and curvy, and that I’m quite satisfied with such an arrangement.

But wait! There’s more…