Open for business

Well, I had some issues with my host. Didn't have time to resolve it, since I was all of a sudden quite busy with school. It shouldn't happen again, though.

I'm going to be using this place to showcase some of what I've been working on, just as soon as I bring it to a presentable state.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

GDC is over

And what a conference it was. My first time, don't you know. I think that I have learned a lot from what I have seen there. I intend to write an overblown and pretentious manifesto about one of the patterns that I observed, regarding what we game makers - not just designers, but programmers, artists, writers, support engineers, marketers, the whole chain - can do to ensure that the future is great.

Ostensibly, "democratization" was the big theme/buzzword for the entire gathering, but I perceived another major trend: everything that is big and promising and exciting has to do with magnifying user participation. I feel like I finally, completely understand what Raph Koster was talking about two years ago.

Up, Up, and Away

I'm off to GDC first thing in the morning tomorrow. Yeah, that will put me there rather early. I'm sure to be busy playing the ol' conference-going game, but I'll see if I can find time while I'm there to comment on the neat things I'm sure run into. In either case, you can expect impressions eventually (for values of "eventually" less than two weeks from the present).

Why you are here

My name is Mark Kollasch and I think about games. A lot. Video games are prominent in this, because they're flashy and exciting and that's where the money is, but there are many other kinds of game that I haven't forgotten about. Board games. Social games. Sports. Gambling in all its forms. Little xkcd-esque games that you play in your mind because you can't help yourself. I think about games because I play them, and I play games so that I can think about them afterward.

Lots of people seem to be thinking about games as of late. Some of them are establishing a working vocabulary so that we people who think about games can tell each other about it. Some of them are comparing notes and helping their fellow professionals to improve. Some are just looking for ways to pass the time, whereas with others, there's simply no telling how much they'll accomplish in the end.

It is my intention, through the use of this blog, to join this emerging sphere of discourse. In the future (or, to those of you browsing the archives, the present) you should expect to see my observations, ranging from trivial to comprehensive, on the design of specific games or games in general; my comments on the process of developing and programming video games; and, on occasion, my impressions of certain games from the perspective of a player.

Like so many other things, I will think of writing in this place as an in-development game in its own right. As a student, I expect that the rules will become clearer as I become more familiar with it. However, at least one thing is certain: if you are reading this now, that means I am winning.