It's been a great year. I hope everyone has as much and more fortune next year!

cheers,

I think PuzzleQuest has a piece of pure genius in it. Using match-3 to obtain mana for spells is awesome!

The rest of the game: inane story, awful dialog, ultra-slow combat, blah, blah, makes me a horrible person. So, I don't play it, but I might steal some of its genius someday. :-)

Dude,

Where's the standalone Mac version?  :-)

As much as I would like to see the macho and machine culture disappear, I also want to see "pinkness" burn in hell.

I want there to be pink games and macho games and all sorts of games at every end along every axis.

And you're right, developers could do a lot by removing offensive material in their products... material that isn't necessary to the specific product.

I also want products that offend. I hope someone finds DHGSiT offensive. All our work would be for nothing. But I mainly hope most people will 'get' the satire and go with it.

Possibly because "men" don't want to buy some game about baking a cake? Where are the casual games directed at males?

Casual games have gone through a lot, but their roots are asexual: Bejeweled, Zuma, various solitaires, Mahjong, Mystery Case Files, Bookworm. Before Diner Dash, there was Betty's Beer Bar, and although the main character was female, her actions were gender neutral.

Now that's changing. Today's top ten on Big Fish:

1. Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate
2. Mystery in London
3. Farm Frenzy
4. Fairway Solitaire
5. Agatha Christie: Peril at End House
6. Christmasville
7. Amazing Adventures: The Lost Tomb
8. Home Sweet Home
9. Holly: A Christmas Tale
10. Elf Bowling 7 1/7: The Last Insult

Since when did guys play Christmas games? Home Sweet Home? Farm Frenzy? All I can say is, put up the money or get shut out. The market goes where the money is.

Obviously, there are still a lot of cross-gender casual games. Will they fade away? I dunno.

The funny thing is, I don't think teenage boys have ever made up a majority or even a plurality of gamers. There was a poll a few years ago that showed they were actually outnumbered by adult females, and there's a lot of other research showing that girls game a lot more often than popular conception would have you believe.

I think the real problem (if you can even describe it as such) is that females aren't very well-represented amongst the "hardcore."

'...a few years ago...' Go back a bit farther, to NES and SNES and Genesis and Playstation 1, that's what little boys were made of! (Funny thing, if you go back even farther, Atari 2600, there was a decent diversity of games played by both girls and boys: Pong, Pitfall, QBert, Centipede, PacMan, Mario ad naseum, Infocom? Sierra Quests?)

And 'hardcore' is a decreasingly important target, as considered by the game industry. But like TeamQuiggan says, they'll always be a factor, since they spend so much.

And another thing on the subject of money and sex discrimination. Recent studies showed that men and women are playing casual games on a fairly equal basis, but a significantly greater number of women are paying for them! Will that bias developers to womanize their titles just that much more?

Thanks Eden, for mentioning "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!"

I'm going to use that title as my springboard into this puddle. I think, already, the war is over, but the last battles have yet to be fought. Women and Men can today draw from a huge variety of games suited to most tastes. And the variety is growing by leaps and bounds.

Yes, the industry is still full of guys, on the development side, but more and more women artists, producers, and designers are getting in. The business side has been well represented in the last few years. Programming, well, it's gender imbalance reaches far beyond the scope of the game industry.

As much as I'd like the discussion of gender privilege to continue, so I can hold up DHSGiT as an example of a game with young girls that strived not to be a girly game, I just can't get too motivated over the issue like I used to. For every FPS that shipped this year to boys, young and old, and more than a few girls, more than 10 casual games (not all hidden object clones) were played by a larger audience of men and women.

There's still work to do, and we need to keep aware of the issue. There are still salary battles and glass ceilings and in-gender in-fighting... sigh.

To conclude: The game industry, with their historical 14-year-old boy target, may have circled their wagons. It has now been encircled by a vastly larger tribe of post-apocalyptic metro-sexual men and women.

Just got my feedback. Have to say, if I were less egotistical, I could appreciate it more.

It doesn't sound very encouraging. My best score was in audio, and I think the audio in 'Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!' is passing to poor. Several comments were upbeat or suggested specific improvements.

If only one of them hadn't wrote, 'Too Many Clicks!' In the movie, Amadaeus, Mozart replied with bewilderment, "I used only the notes I required but no more."

Same here, bewildered. A better comment would have been. 'Here are specific clicks you don't need.' Now that would have been helpful. Compared to Japanese RPG click-fests like Final Fantasy, I worked specifically to keep my game flowing with a minimum of clicks. The one click I wish I could remove is the 'continue' after an encounter's final message is. But how would I know it's been read and is ready to clear?

Bioware solves this by having a global message area where the message history can be scrolled and the last one is always visible. We'd have to shoehorn such a construct into our boardgame UI metaphor. I think the results would not be very pretty, and possibly more confusing to novice gamers.

I am very grateful for the IGF and their judges feedback. It does give me a sense of how much more work I still have to do. I received nothing like it from the last contest I entered. Then again, DHSGiT won $3,000 from the Casual Game Association for 'Most Innovative Game' out of 80 submitted to their Innovate'07 contest.

...still need to work on that ego. :-)

Better yet, download the drivers that let bluetooth enabled Macs read data from the wiimote. And make a game!

http://www.wiili.org/index.php/Main_Page

A hearty cheer to the winners:

http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

Eternal Darkness, Zelda Wind Waker, Star Wars - Rogue Leader II.

For Wii, if you haven't tried it, Godfather. It's pretty fun, if you like that sort of thing. Better than GTA, story wise. Fun Wiimote control of gameplay.

How about Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble?

 I've backed-off from calling it an RPG, but it was inspired by them. For a while I was calling it a party-based adventure game. Now, I'm calling it a board-game that simulates an RPG.

Now I get to eat crow.

MTI did respond to my email, and they were very nice.

Keith:

We'll think about it, and I don't want to debate what an interactive sit com
is - or do I?

But anyway, I want to say that since you wrote, I visited your site,
downloaded Witch and the Dangerous High School Girls game and thought the
game designs were really clever. I especially liked the High School game. I
like how you convey a lot of info in quick icons. And it works, I picked it
up pretty quickly. It all made sense.

Clearly you're not a making a living from these games, so I'm curious, what
else do you do? You and your few partners seem very creative and able to
make nice tight games.

Best,

Jeff

Let's hear it for good neighbors in the indie scene!!!

yah,

P.S. and that bit about us not making a living isn't quite true. When we actually start selling DHSGiT, we plan to make millions, I tell you, MILLIONS!!!

Needed to clear my head from too much script writing and debugging. A little mischief always helps...

There's a web-site claiming their product is the world's first interactive sit-com:

http://supplegame.com/

Well, that's not true, and although there's nothing I can do to ensure the truth is told, I can at least tease them about it. Therefore I sent to them the following email:

Hello,

Just a friendly email, to inform MTI games about some bad information on their Supple web pages.

Our product, 'The Witch's Yarn' is an interactive sit-com that shipped in Dec. 2005. It was a finalist in the IGF that following spring. Clearly, Supple is NOT the first interactive sit-com. I won't claim that The Witch's Yarn is the first, but it precedes Supple.

I do hope MTI games will correct their website. How about 'Most popular interactive sit-com.' instead?


tee hee,

Keith Nemitz
Ordinauteur
Mousechief Co.
www.mousechief.com "We put mischief in your mouse."

I'd be surprised if they respond. Their game sounds interesting, but it's not Mac compatible, and I rarely bother to wire my PC together to play a casual game.

You can volunteer to work the conference. For 20 hours of effort, you get to attend the whole enchilada.

http://www.gdconf.com/volunteers/caregistration.php

You have to make your way to the SF bay. They have a special room rate for volunteers at the hotels, unless you can find crash space near the BART.

I attended the IGS last year, by working the entire session. The volunteer organizers really try to ensure you get to see at least one or two sessions of your choice.

Thanks everyone,

I had my hopes, but so did 80 other developers who entered.

Papillon's win blows me away because her entry was something she cobbled together while she was finishing up Fatal Hearts. She mentioned inventing a cool, new game mechanic... and promptly buttoned her lips. Good speed to her next effort!

This disgusts me.

I don't want your blood money.

SCORE!

I won a troll from the moderator! Now, that must be worth something!

...but it's probably not worth 'reporting to the moderator' :-)

I haven't seen this mentioned here, but this news really shows there is a lot of opportunity for independent developers.

Hanako Games won 1st place, $80,000, and a publishing contract at the Casual Connect Conference two weeks ago. CCC is the GDC of the casual game industry. (a 1 BILLION dollar industry :-) Innovate is their IGF.

Mousechief Co. won Most Innovative Game and a cool three grand, without the obligatory contract.

Anyone else here enter or win?

Here's the link:

http://www.casualgamesassociation.org/for_professionals_recognition.php

On one hand, some people want the IGF to be a place where non-signed indies can get the world to see the fruit of their labor...

On the other, some people want the IGF to be a place to celebrate all that indies can achieve, including highlighting the works of some of the more polished and well financed developers.

Maybe the trick would be to make those separate categories. The ones they have now are sorta 'traditional tweaked' but lacking. There isn't even one for writing/story. Like audio, dynamic text/speech is just as much a part of computer games as is dynamic music.

I find it a little weird to judge schmups vs. interactive fiction vs. MMOGs... sorry, I digress.

They should all be florissant green so nobody gets lost.

Last year, the conference associates wore florescent green. If they wear the same again, expect to be asked directions to the bathroom eight times an hour.