On Feb 2, 2007, at 11:11 AM, Kristin Looney wrote:
I just started pitching our games to thinkgeek.com, and I
have been telling the buyer that geeks love our games. We
were guests of honor a a Linux conference once, and Fluxx
and pyramid games are common at such geeky conventions!
so I thought I would put a call out to this list for a
few geek specific testimonials to send them - to help
convince them that our games would be a good fit for
their web site. Anyone want to take a crack at telling
me what it is that makes our games good geek gifts?
Icehouse is an ideal geek game system. It is a modular, reusable
component, much more elegant and efficient than the the bulky, single
use boards and pieces used by most games. It has proven to be a
wonderful system for experimentation and game design, as an open
system that anyone can tinker with. Furthermore, numerous Icehouse
games are great geek games; RAMbots lets you program robots, Zendo is
a beautiful game of inductive logic, Homeworlds is a great game of
scientific conquest, and so on. The sheer elegance, beauty, and
simplicity of the Icehouse game system, combined with the great games
that are available for it, make it my absolute favorite game system,
and in fact several of the games are my favorite games.
Fluxx tickles a common geek funny-bone; geeks tend to love anything
meta, or higher-order. A game in which the cards change the rules of
the game as you play allows geeks to manipulate the game from within
the game, satisfying that meta-hacking instinct, and is also just fun
for geeks who like to tinker and change things. I usually get more
fun out of setting up interesting combinations of rules (draw 4, play
5, X=X+1, or maybe draw 5, play 1, first play random, better watch
out for that 10 cards in hand goal) that just make the game chaotic
and crazy, or that make the strategy change in interesting ways, than
I do by trying to win.
Brian Campbell
I'm listed as "UberGeek" on my roster, but that might be a bit
presumptuous. You could list me as "Computer Proggammer",
"Educational Games Programmer", "Hacker", or something similar if you
want. Hmm. You could list me as "Metaprogrammer", given the content
of my testimonial and the fact that I develop programming languages
for educational games using higher-order techniques and metaprogramming.