The Quixotic Engineer

Although I’m not taking part in this year’s Global Game Jam, I coincidentally decided to also put together a small game over the last two days. It was a feat only made possibly by the friendliness of the LÖVE 2D engine, a free weekend and several pots of tea.

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Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics continues to be a fascinating read. This is, in large part, because so much of his analysis of comics can be directly applied to video games, a new medium currently sorely lacking in critical vocabulary. McCloud has a knack for asking the right questions, and the further I read the faster the little wheels in my head begin to spin. The first chapter of the book asked the question “what is comics?”, which led me to question the definition of video games.

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Over the holidays, I picked up a copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It’s a comic about comics as a medium, and the concepts and vocabulary (abstraction, closure, transitions, etc.) that define it. McCloud avoids using specific artists, styles, genres or themes as a template, focusing instead on a critical universal examination of the artform. As someone who recently rediscovered comics, it’s been a truly fascinating read. The book also interests me because I can relate many of his ideas to another nascent medium that is of particular interest to me: video games.

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Fleet Foxes – s/t

A delightful, dreamy folk album that evokes the softer side of Jethro Tull. It’s lovingly and masterfully crafted from beginning to end. “White Winter Hymnal” is the perfect song for a chilly December afternoon, and “Ragged Wood” feels like a long walk through a familiar forest.

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This last week, I was invited to take part in an incredibly ambitious podcast by Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer. As part of his gamers confab series (in which I was kindly invited to participate back in September), he has invited nineteen fellow bloggers to talk about their personal favourite games of 2008. Amazingly, the twenty of us picked twenty different titles, showing just how diverse this year in gaming has been.

The three volumes run for about an hour each, which may seem a bit daunting if you’re not a regular podcast listener. However, the discussion is insightful, entertaining, delightful and well worth your time. You can find my conversation with Chris Dahlen and Michael “Sparky” Clarkson in the second half of Volume 2.

• Download Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 [MP3]
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe to the feed

I also wrote up my top 10 games of 2008 for Snackbar, as part of their staff picks series. Once again there was very little selection consensus, a stark contrast to 2007’s focus on titles such as Bioshock and Portal. A pessimist (*cough*) might say that this is a symptom of the large number of “great but flawed” titles released this year. I choose to believe that this is the natural progression of video games maturing as a medium. The audience for games is no longer homogeneous, and neither are our tastes.