You want games as art? I'll give you games as art.

Hatetris.

This is game-programming-as-sculpture, not "I want to make something that's fun to play" (sculpture equivalent: "I want to make something that looks pretty"), but an attempt to achieve a platonic ideal -- find the sculpture already in the stone. Everyone who's played Tetris has felt at some time like the game hates them. This is an attempt to program a version of Tetris that really does hate you, the pattern within the pattern made real.

It's not perfect. I don't think it quite works. It's a draft. But it's still art.

Floor Wax / Dessert Topping

Game designer interviews are depressing. There's too much money on the line for candid statements. I don't remember the last time I read or watched an interview with a game designer where I didn't always know what the response would be just by reading the question.

Take this one, for instance.

It's about Dead Space 2.

I loved Dead Space. Loved loved loved. I would go so far as to say I lurveded Dead Space. I am really looking forward to Dead Space 2. The reveal trailor has me pumped. Necromorphs and PTSD? Yes, please!

(I want a whole Aliens movie with no aliens in it, just Ripley dealing with PTSD. Remember, the amount of subjective time she's spent between the beginning of the first movie and the end of the fourth is maybe two months, and most of that was as a dockworker between the rescue at the beginning of Aliens and getting recruited to go back to the colony.)

Man, take a look at that interview. "We're adding more action!" "Won't that entail reducing the horror?" "No, there'll be just as much horror as before, but more action! We're empowering the protagonist!"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't horror traditionally entail giving the audience the impression of a disempowered protagonist? (Ha! Irony, suggesting action precludes horror in a blog post that invokes Aliens. But you know what I mean.)

...

Again, I get it. They've got to say something. Gotta keep the hype up. Gotta chase that Modern Warfare 2 audience, but can't risk scaring away the established fans either.

The really terrible thing is, even if they're being completely sincere, and they're Aliens-level competent, and it really is going to be just as scary as Dead Space while also being way more action-packed, this interview doesn't tell me that, because they'd be saying the exact same thing if they had no idea what they were doing, and were just creating an incoherent mess. It has zero information content.

So much gaming press is like that.