I didn't mean to say earlier that mathematics should be excluded from a discussion of art, because mathematics is a medium and can be used artistically, and that mathematical beauty exists, it's just that there's a real difference between art and math, and what applies to art doesn't necessarily apply to math, and if you treat math and art as the same thing you will just get into a muddle, because math and art are different things, even on the sensory level.

Nobody claimed that the two categories are equivalent.  If I say "literature is art" that doesn't mean that all art is literature, or that art and literature are the same thing, just that literature is a subset of art.  Mathematics can be reasonably precisely defined.  Art is a much larger and much vaguer category that contains all kinds of different things humans do for their aesthetic value and perceived inherent worth.

I wish I hadn't brought it up at all now.  I thought I was making a completely non-controversial statement.  I guess there are no such statements in philosophy.

Exactly, UDP broadcasting is the secret. I've actually done this before, it's not too hard.

Here's a link: http://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/intermediate.html#broadcast

Excellent, thank you.  This will come in handy.

So I'm working on this game that kind of has a significant multiplayer focus.  At the moment to join games you have to type in the IP address of the host.  Lots of games seem magically detect games on the local network, which is a nice feature but I have no idea how to implement it.  First question: does anyone know how to do this?  Googling for a tutorial doesn't work very well; I just find lots of people trying to play existing games.

I think doing this over the internt is quite a different thing to doing it over a local network; I expect you'd need some kind of fixed server to maintain a list of available games.  Second question: how would I go about setting something like this up, and what kind of cost and effort would I be looking at?  Third question: is this necessary; would people not like a game if there is not some kind of matchmaking server?

Humor me: what makes mathematics art?

It is an application of higher brain functions (including creativity) performed for its own sake.  It is considered to be inherently worthwhile to prove interesting theorems regardless of practical application.  See wikipedia for an explanation of the aesthetics.

It's obviously not easy to define "art" precisely, but I think under most definitions this will fit.

Making (and playing) games consists of creating and exploring abstract systems of rules, which is a similar kind of activity to doing mathematics.  A good strategy for a game is (in my opinion) less beautiful than a good mathematical theorem, but the kind of beauty is similar.

I wouldn't argue that the only way a game (as a complete packaged entity) can be artistic is through gameplay.  Dreamfall's story, for example, is certainly a work of art.  However, the game itself (what happens while you are actually playing) is pretty bad.
If you can get all of the "art" value out of a game by watching a video of someone else playing through it, then is it an artistic game?  I'd say no; it can still be a work of art, but it is not a game of art.

Of course, if the story is told through the gameplay, that's another thing entirely.  This is not something we see enough of.

But seriously, I don't have much respect for the aesthetic tastes of anyone who likes the author of The Da Vinci Code -- that book is, like, a book for people who don't read books. At least the Harry Potter books have their intended audience (children) as an excuse, but that has nothing.

Uh.. I kind of doubt he was saying he actually likes that rubbish.  Just that stories in games are so blindly awful that they don't even reach the (low) standard  of these authors.

edit: Not that I agree with him (Torment and Dreamfall are obvious counterexamples), I just think you are flaming him on a misunderstanding.  Games can manage to have great stories.  However, I don't think storytelling is the purpose of the medium, or why it should be considered art.  Games are art for the same reason mathematics is art.

I have a vague recollection of seeing somewhere in the internest a story by someone in the games industry recounting how someone came to them with a "brilliant game idea" which consisted of an incoherent diagram on a scrap of paper.  I've had a bit of a search for it, I thought it might have been on sloperama.com, but I can't find it anywhere.  So here (attached) is my attempt to reproduce roughly how it looked.

So, the competition idea: Everyone takes a game mechanic from their file of probably-never-to-see-daylight ideas and tries to illustrate it as a diagram without using text.  Next, everyone picks one (or more) of the collected images and tries to interpret it back into a game.

This could inspire some unusual game mechanics, while at the same time giving some kind of use for our ideas that are never going to get made into a game.  Also, I think the diagrams will have a certain aesthetic appeal.

Other ideas that I like from the list: Educational Software, Commonplace Book, Mobile Audiosurf Squad, and any kind of mashup idea.

I'm a maths student, from New Zealand, currently studying in the UK.  I've been making games since I was small - first board games, then with BASIC, and now in C++ (after a brief foray into Java).

I've joined up because I'm interested in the competitions.  I'm not entering the current one because my game and my research are both moving along quite well at the moment, so I don't want to add in something else and lose momentum.  But when this game is done I'm planning to make several small quick games (rather than an all-consuming monster that gobbles up my time), so I think these competitions will be fun for that.

The game I'm currently working on is a mathematically-inspired real time strategy game called Vertex Dispensor.  More on that later.