Results tagged “twitter” from The Gameshelf
Thanks to Twitter, I found myself vicariously attending GDC this year. Allow me to recount some of the more interesting things I heard people talking about.
Anna Anthropy released REDDER, a puzzley explore-and-collect game, free to play on the Newgrounds portal. Unlike When Pigs Fly, her previous effort, the difficultly comes not from its demanding feats of digital dexterity, but rather from the large size of the world, and the things about the world you must learn and remember while you strive to collect the shiny treasures. Give it a try, and block out a couple of hours to play it through if you like it.
One reason why I like Anna's games in particular is the same reason I liked watching the latter-day Battlestar Galactica so much. Ron Moore, BSG's executive producer, took advantage of internet publishing to create and release commentary tracks, in podcast format, almost at the same time the shows aired. They felt less like a producer reminiscing about a past project, and more like lectures about the challenges and strategies of putting an episodic TV show together, spoken by someone who was still in the thick of it.
Similarly, Anna is at least as active in presenting lectures and articles on level design (which we've linked to before) as she is with releasing actual games. Soon after I started When Pigs Fly and saw the grassy turf three screens over from the start, I may have said "heh heh" out loud. I felt that I knew exactly why she put it there, even though it had no explicit in-game effect, and I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't been reading along with her exegetic work.
I am once again participating in the MIT Mystery Hunt this year, playing on the team "Immoral, Illegal & Fattening", a group of 40 or so solvers out of the many hundreds of hardcore puzzle fans in attendance. This will be my seventh Hunt, but my first since I starting getting into the ol' Twitter, and as such I quickly became consumed by that question that held no meaning before 2007, but now occurs to me with curious regularity: What is the hashtag for this?
For lack of a more obviously correct solution, I decided last week to get all Wikipedia on the problem and boldly declare that the tag would be #mysteryhunt. And so, apparently, it is. Anyone - Twitter-using and otherwise - should feel free to follow that tag to see the latest chatter about this most unusual annual event. As I write this, the tag exists in that pre-event state where its tweets are mainly involved with complaints of air travel while all the players gather, so it remains to be seen how it goes from here.
Honestly, I don't know how well this will work, compared to, say, a hashtag attached to a conference. Because the Hunt is a competitive event, with teams generally not wishing to provide information that might accidentally help their opponents, it wouldn't surprise me if things clam up tight once the solving gets underway, and then burst out with a flood of mingled celebration and disbelief as soon as one of the teams wins. Then again... yeah, I have no idea.
Anyway, there it is. Enjoy!
Another little bit of behind-the-scenesery for you: I had a great deal of fun raiding The Prelinger Archives, a collection of public domain films, to fill out the Diplomacy episode's visuals. I expect it to be a well I'll return to often for future episodes.
One film I borrowed from extensively was Conquer by the Clock, a jawdropping American propaganda film from the WWII era. Not only is its delirious visual motif of belligerent, floating clocks wonderful (and quite useful for recontextualizing), but its message is a fascinating window into the psychology of a nation completely mobilized for war. Of particular note is the lesson that every time you take a break from work, soldiers die (and/or go insane). Think of that, the next time you take a minute to screw around reading game blogs!
On another note, I've added Twitter and Facebook links to the bottom of every post on this site, as well as a few other small design changes. Feel free to let me know what you think of them!
I'm sitting on a rumbling pile of Gameshelf show news that isn't quite ready to announce yet. In the meantime, allow me to say that I've become a Twitter convert, and you can read my daily steam-venting @jasonmcintosh. Feel free to construct your own narrative about what the heck I'm working on based on a reverse-time reading of my 140-character burbles.
Should I make a separate twitter account for The Gameshelf? I'm thinking it needs one for sure only if the show gets back into a regular production cycle. Until then, you'll have to content yourself with the ramblings of its producer, and the fact that he's just as likely to talk about delicious ham sandwiches and dorky web technologies as he is about games or do-it-yourself TV production. (But I do tweet a lot about that stuff, too.)
P.S.: Gameshelf cast and bloggers should feel free to share their Twitter IDs and links in comments to this post, if they wish. My pre-Web2.0 sense of propriety prevents me from doing it for them!
