If you haven’t heard about Will Wright’s latest project, Spore, do yourself a favor and check out his plans. As the Bard said, ambition can be a grievous fault and this design plan is high on ambition.

We’ve heard ambitious stuff like this before, mostly from Peter Molyneux, who sells each of his games as if it is the ultimate world simulator. Remember how Fable was supposed to have trees that grew dynamically? And how Black and White was supposed to be fun? The Movies promises to allow unprecedented freedom of action but even the claims made for it seem to have been scaled back in the last few months.

So forgive my caution when I hear about Spore. On the upside, this is Will Wright – not a guy known for his hyperbole. Not all of his games have been successes. In fact, when I read about Spore the first game that came to mind was SimEarth, an ambitious environmental/ecological/evolution sim that was more textbook than game. If Spore will allow me to mess about on the cellular level and check out what is going on on other planets, this will be the ultimate god game.

I doubt any game has serious theological implications, but this could be as close as we get. Players might be able to be either detached observer gods – cosmic watchmakers – or interventionst Old Testament deities that micromanage star systems. As the game progresses, players will be able to do more and unlock greater content.

This is yet another game to look forward to, but, by the sound of it it could be a couple of years off. It is a big gamble for Wright, and EA, if they choose to publish it. If it works it could prove as difficult to duplicate successfully as The Sims has proven to be – are there any good Sims clones out there? – and could cement Wright’s place at the very top of the game god Pantheon.

Last year’s best independent game, Gish from Chroniclogic, and Wik and the Fable Souls from Reflexive won the big prizes at this years Independent Games Festival. Gish won in the open category and Wik took top honors in the Web/Downloadable category. A complete list of winners can be found here.

Big congratulations to Reflexive Entertainment. The Web/Downloadable category is so packed with small brilliant games that it can be hard to really stand out. Gish was in the Web category last year and came away with nothing. But to win with an action/adventure game – albeit a very pretty action/adventure game – is quite an accomplishment. I haven’t had the opportunity to give Wik a spin yet, and it should probably be left in the hands of someone more competent with tongue-grabbing Gollum like creatures.

I am less excited about the Gish win, even though I love the game, mostly because Gish was there last year. Yes, it was robbed last year – winning zero awards. Oasis earned its win in the web category in 2004, though, so I can’t complain too loudly. But with all the new games to IGF there, the victory of Gish comes at the expense of products that few had seen in competition. Besides; Gish has been recognized as almost everyone’s indie game of 2004. What does winning one more award in a show that you’ve been to before (albeit in a different category) prove?

I’m not so much of a communist that I think that everyone should get awards. If Gish was the best game in the category it certainly deserves to win. The real question is whether a game that was nominated in a previous year should be eligible for re-entry. I would tend to argue against this possibility. The IGF showcase is about more than giving prizes. It’s about giving independent developers a chance to show their new projects; not the same projects that they have been working on for the last two years.

Still, give credit where it is due. Gish is the best platform jumper ever made for the PC and you do yourself a disservice by not playing it.

These recent articles about New Games Journalism have a lot of bloggers blogging and chattering classes chattering. The gist of it goes as follows: Most games journalism is little more than PR hype, fanboy ravings, previews and reviews. Even the features usually run the same stale gamut from “women in gaming” to “violence in games”. NGJ is a more reflective style of writing, not quite self-referential, but more focused on how the player reacts to the game; it’s less about whether the game is good or not. Gaming is discussed not as a series of products or release dates, but as a cultural activity to be explored.

Some of the criticisms of this approach are in very tongue in cheek. They mock the idea that anyone really cares about what a game writer is going through or how many cultural touchstones they can hit. Considering how many game writers like to reference comic books, Star Trek and Chuck Palahniuk, I don’t see why people should get so bent out of shape. Sure it can sound pretentious, but that’s certainly no worse than sounding like king of the nerds all the time.

Matt Peckham, who writes for Gamespy and PCGamer among others, has posted a more thoughtful critique of the idea of NGJ, but I think he gets a little lost in the idea of whether or not a game can be artistic. I don’t think that NGJ requires an artistic game in order to produce artistic writing. Think of all the good writing out there about horror or science-fiction. Most of the stuff being discussed is certainly not on the order of a Tolstoy or a Shakespeare, but it can produce genuine feelings within the reader/viewer. Same with gaming. Which brings us to Matt’s best point.

It’s all about the writing.

A good writer who knows what he/she is talking about can make their experience(s) come alive. It can have very little to do with how good the game is. Check out, for example, one my favorite examples of good game writing, Tom Chick’s Shoot Club columns. Take “Trevor, Angel of Death” as an example. Your standard piece of comedic fiction in which the bombastic Trevor’s expectations for a game are laid low by the fact that no one can really figure out how to play it. Sound familiar? How often has your first session with a new game been complete chaos because you had no idea what the hotkeys were or what was going on around you? And it’s not like Swat 3 is some giant piece of art.

This is what, I think, a lot of the critics of NGJ are missing. New Games Journalism is not about the art of the games, but the experience of the play. It’s not about the writer being the smartest guy in the room, it’s about the writer saying, as we often do to our fellow gamers, “A funny thing occured to me while I was playing Civ.” What makes NGJ different from casual conversation is the skill involved in making me care about the outcome whether I know the game or not.

Matt is right. NGJ is not new. It’s just what we used to call good writing. There be precious little of that in the game journalism world, but frankly, there’s precious little of that in any journalist world. If we could all be Tom Chicks, Erik Wolpaws or even Matt Peckhams it would be a much richer world for me to work in, and it might help advance the image of gaming as something that serious people do.

Troubled Canadian publisher Strategy First has announced that it will publish Battle of Europe, yet another combat flight sim set in World War II. It is being developed by MAUS Software (no relation to the classic graphic novel).

This is, of course, good news for Strategy First. There have been rumors of its imminent demise for quite a while now. There was a time not so long ago when they were publishing almost every major historical strategy game on the market plus a number of minor titles from every genre.

They were, in a way, victims of their own success. Number of titles seemed to become more important than quality and the volume of titles to publish and promote made it unlikely that it would ever turn a profit on all of them and require a huge hit to cover the losses.

And Strategy First never had the huge hit.

Not commercially at least. They had their share of critical hits. Europa Universalis I and II. Rails Across America. Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. Waterloo. But no best sellers.

According to Mobygames, 27 of the 56 games they’ve pubished were in one year (2002). That kind of production in a single year requires a huge budget and with no breakout game to pay for it, it must have been hard to make sure that all the bills were paid on time.

It’s good to see them up and running, but publishing a flight sim from a developer no one has heard of is a long fall from their glory days of only a few years ago. I wish my fellow Canucks all the luck in the world; we’ll see if they get the success that they sorely need.

IGF finalist Supremacy: Four Paths to Power has gone gold at last. This sci-fi turn-based strategy game looks like it could be the sleeper hit of the year, the game that all the cool kids are talking about come spring.

It is also another game picked up by Matrix Games, quickly becoming the indie strategy developers’ publisher of choice. Though I still prefer a retail box to a digital download, the convenience of their game delivery system and smoothness of updates (and press relations) is making Matrix a personal favorite.

Not that all their games are good. In this month’s CGM, you will see my dismissive review of Gates of Troy, for example. But they show a willingness to take on indie projects from companies with a wide range of experience.

I am really looking forward to Supremacy. It has tactical ground combat a la X-Com and the space conquest thing going for it. When I get my copy and write my review, I’ll happily share my opinions.

I couldn’t be at the Game Developers’ Conference this year, but apparently I missed a helluva keynote speech by Raph Koster, one of the giants of online game design. His address (transcribed here) was largely derived from his recent book Theory of Fun and Game Design.

You can read the transcription for yourself, but I’ll say that I think it’s pretty good. Though I disagree with his assessment of Bookworm, he’s right on the nose that the trick of game design is to present a pattern that players can recognize but not defeat too quickly. Total randomness means that it’s not a game at all; total repetition is a bore.

His discussion of the place of art in gaming is also on the nose. From the transcription:

Art and entertainment are terms of intensity, not terms of type. The difference between Cheers, Friends, and a medieval morality play are NOT THAT BIG. They are predictable. They are for reassurance, they are building cognitive schemata through repetition – seven seasons worth – and then sometimes you get Lolita. That makes us nervous. It’s challenging. Breaks the routine. As long as we as designers and developers come into the process knowing everything our games say, games will be doomed as mere entertainment. We have to make something like Lolita. Schindlers list. Catcher in the Rye. That’s the sign of a mature medium, a game that makes you think ‘I don’t quite know what this might mean..’.

Finally, someone who gets the distinction between art and form. There are always those people that will say that anything people create is art. Koster gets that art requires a little more. (I’d intended to keep this blog “games as art” free, but I guess there’s no escape.)

Some of my favorite sentences:

“Every game is destined to be boring so we can routinise it.”
“The dressing however is incredibly important. Remember that the rest of the world sees the dressing.”
“Games are the cartoon version of real world sophisticated problems.”
“The console manufacturers are currently recommending 8 hours of gameplay rather than 40. ”
“Players try to make gameplay as predictable as possible. Which means it becomes boring. Exciting can get you killed.”

If you were there, let me know what you thought of the speech. I’m still digesting it, but, like much that Koster has to say, there is a lot here to mine.