The Gaming Philosopher

Interactive Fiction Top 50 Link to forum topic. Based on a discussion on the interactive fiction forum , I am organising a interactive fiction top 50 (or a top 100, or a top 20, depending on the number of participants and the distribution of the votes). You send in a list of your favourite IF games, I add those lists together and publish a "best of" list. The aim is not to decide what the best IF ever is by majority vote -- that would be foolish. Rather, the aims of the top 50 are: To create a good opportunity for people to think about the best games they have played, and discuss their ideas on this topic with others. To allow people to be inspired by what they see on other people's lists. To create a useful list of great games at which you can point newcomers to the IF scene. If it is successful and we do this every few years: to create a way to track how the taste of the community evolves. To make this work, we need your help. Please send us a list of be...

A small reminder for people who want to enter the IF Comp: the deadline for intents to enter is in two days. No reason to delay any longer! (Note: I'm not an organiser.)

Nowadays, many games offer an achievement system: if the player manages to do X, the game recognises this and keeps a record of it in a privately or publicly accessible place. Many of us will have felt a deep suspicion about achievements. Aren't they designed to appeal to the worst part of us, the part that likes to hoard (and sleep, and feed)? Isn't the whole point of achievements to seduce us to waste our time trying to get them all, even though doing this is neither particularly fulfilling nor particularly fun? Such suspicions are well-founded, and very often correct. Mocking achievements is good. And yet, there also good achievements, achievements that do add something to the game experience. So let us look at what is good and what is bad. (Recommended reading: achievement design 101 at Gamasutra.) Good achievements Additional challenge Many games ask you to perform at a certain level before you are allowed to continue. In a shooter, you must get through the leve...

Kerkerkruip has entered beta, and I'm looking for a few testers. If you are interested, please send me an email at victor@cc.lilith -- except that I have cunningly switched "lilith" and "cc" to confuse the spam bots! Even if you don't have time to really test the game, you can still help me out in a few minutes if you have access to (a) OS X, or (b) older hardware. I need to know how the game runs on the OS X interepreters, and I need to know what the minumum hardware requirements are. ( Kerkerkruip runs without noticable delays on my own system, but turns take a noticable, though not irritating, amount of time on an EEE-PC netbook.) Also, I will post no more updates about the game on this blog until the competition is over. I do not want to build "hype", or even raise the suspicion that I am trying to do so. So radio silence starts now.