I’ve received nine submissions to my call for artwork so far, with a small handful of others who’ve said they plan to contribute as well. I have to admit, this is a lot more than I expected, though I suspect the project in question will be better for it — the more places to explore, the better, right? Anyway, given that so many people seem to be intrigued, I thought I’d talk a little bit about what this thing’s all about, and what you all can expect. [1]

The game’s another one of those not-really-a-game games I’ve been tinkering with lately. It’s a series of disjoint interactive conversational vignettes that all make up a single dream sequence. These vignettes are randomized into a different order each playthrough, highlighting the absence of a coherent, author-generated plot progression. Instead, much like dreams themselves, the plot becomes a creation of the player, who pieces what they’ve just seen into their own personal narrative. They have no control over the images presented to them, but it’s up to them to decide what they mean.

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I came across yet another Adventure Gamers thread started by some game developer trying to solicit statistics on what people enjoy and don’t enjoy in games. While I made it clear that I don’t condone developing games based on such statistics, I later came back and decided to answer the questions anyway, changing them a bit to make it clear that the answers are my personal preferences rather than a reflection of a subgroup of “adventure gamers” as a whole. So, without further ado, here they are…

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I read a post over at Man Bytes Blog today about themes of isolation, how they’re so popular in movies and such these days, and how not enough games intentionally exploit said themes, even despite the fact that games are inherently isolating. And then I felt really really good about myself because lo and behold, my most recent games actually do deal quite a bit with isolation in their subject matter. Of course, being a little indie designer whose work attracts a niche audience the size of a protozoa, no one really cares all that much. Still, maybe that Corvus Elrod dude might get a kick out of the fact that hey, not all proponents of “games as art” lie purely on the side of theory. Some of them, you know, actually make stuff.

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