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Jason Rohrer buries a board game, wins Game Design Challenge
Game designer Jason Rohrer designed a board game, built it out of 30 pounds of titanium, then buried it in the Nevada desert. A Game for Someone was his entry in the last GDC Game Design Challenge, which carried a theme of "Humanity's Last Game," and it won.Rohrer has never played his game, and he doesn't expect anyone else to for 2,000 years, when future humans discover the mysterious artifact in the desert. Instead, he designed it first as a computer game, using repeated AI playthroughs to automatically refine its rules.Rohrer then handed out sheets of paper loaded with GPS coordinates. One coordinate, on one of the papers, leads to the game; Rohrer estimates that if one person tried one coordinate per day, it would take 2,700 years to find the game. Imagine hundreds of game designers, programmers, artists, academics, students, and journalists dragging metal detectors through the desert. Now that's a game idea.
GDC08: Game Design Challenge tackles inter-species markets
The annual Game Design Challenge is our favorite part every year of the Game Developers Conference ... and thanks to errors in understanding our Google calendar, we missed it. (Note to self: remember time zone differences when adding events.) Fortunately, Gamasutra attended and wrote up the session for us to peruse.This year's theme was to create an inter-species game, one that could be played by another creature. Last year's winner Alexey Pajitnov design Dolphin Ride, a shooting hybrid of the virtual and real worlds that has players working co-operatively with the dolphins. Brenda Braithwaite designed OneHundredDogs, a series of games for dogs (and their owners) to play with and against one another centered around a Facebook-style website.The winner of this year's challenge was Steve Meretzky, creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the game). Meretzky decided to expand his potential audience early by targeting the largest demographic: bacteria. Thus he created TrayStation, where millions of bacteria in a petri dish will have to fight off "defence microwaves." Those that don't perish would "level up." Said Meretzky, "It's the game that makes germ warfare available to the whole family, the game that puts the fun back into fungicide."
A glimpse of things to come from 38 Studios
The keen eyes of Cyndre from the Kill Ten Rats blog has spotted rare images from 38 Studios top secret, as-yet-to-be-named MMO. On Friday, December 14, the Boston news channel NECN did a video interview (see above clip) with Curt Schilling (he, along with R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane comprise the new gaming company 38 Studios) regarding the announcement of their 1st Annual Game Design Challenge. Which is a very cool endeavor in and of itself. According to Cyndre, right around the 1:16 mark of the three minute video interview you'll see images from their game. This has possibly been corroborated on the blog since someone purporting to be Curt Schilling left a comment saying that the animation shown was from pre-production, the phase they are in now. Curt Schilling (famous professional baseball player) is an avid MMO player. Combined with supremely talented R.A. Salvatore (famous fantasy author) and Todd McFarlane (famous comic book artist and writer), the expectations for a spectacular gaming experience is very high indeed. Catching even a quick glimpse of what these guys have in store for gamers is news worthy.
Pajitnov, with needle and thread, wins Game Design Challenge
The game design challenge is an honored tradition four years in the running at the Game Developers Conference, pushing creativity in a competitive, humorous environment. This year's winner was Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov who managed to create a viable action-puzzler using needle, thread and cloth. He bested both David Jaffe (Calling All Cars, God of War) and last year's winner Harvey Smith. The following is a pseudo-live blog of the event from earlier this afternoon. Read on for a full description of each game proposed.
