On Apr 12, 2007, at 1:00 PM, David Artman wrote:
1) I have done some clean-up of the Choosing Games page:
http://icehousegames.org/wiki/?title=Choosing_games
If you are a game designer, I recommend that you head over to that
page
and begin to update it for your game(s). There's 170 games on the
wiki,
but probably only thirty or so actually are sorted into all those
sections.
This is deliberate. Did you read the paragraph at the top of the
page, describing wht it is there? The point of the Choosing Games
page is to list the best games for someone new to Icehouse to try
out, not to list ever Icehouse game ever. For categorization of every
game, we have the categories on the wiki; the problem is that if you
look through all of the categories, it can still be hard to pick
which games out of the categories to play.
What I wanted to do when creating the Choosing Games page is list the
games that will be most rewarding for a new player to learn. This
includes the best and most well known games. A game isn't much fun to
play by yourself, and it can sometimes be difficult to convince
players to learn a new game. Thus, games that are already fairly well
known will have a larger community of player to choose from, as well
as being more likely to be decent games than any game picked at
random. Also, I want to provide a good impression for new players,
and a giant list of every Icehouse game ever, where some of the games
may be hopelessly broken, have ambiguous rules, or just plain not a
very fun game, is not going to give them a good impression of
Icehouse games.
Now, these judgements are obviously subjective; someone's absolute
favorite game may be unknown to anyone else, or people may dislike
one of the most popular games. But on the whole, I think the
following criteria can be used as a decent metric:
1) Has it been published by Looney Labs? These games will pretty much
by definition have a larger base of players, or at least people who
have of them, and have passed the Looneys' quality judgements.
2) Has it won any competitions or awards? These games have definitely
been playtested by players outside of the designers friends, and
rated highly by the players. This includes the Icehouse game design
competition, as well as ones like the Piecepack competition, or any
others that a game might win based on actual playtesting and player
ratings.
3) Has it been implemented on the computer, especially on an online
gaming service like SuperDuperGames or Volity? This indicates that at
least one person liked it well enough to spend the time and effort
writing a computer implementation, and that a relatively wide group
of players have been exposed to it. If on an online service, it means
that it's fairly likely you'll be able to find players even if you
have no local players, which can be a big plus.
I think that if you apply these criteria, you can get the list of
games that should appear on the Choosing Games page. In general, I
don't think that people should put their own games on that page; it
should not be for self-promotion, but instead for introducing new
players to the best that Icehouse has to offer.
Now, this is what I envisioned when I created the Choosing Games
page. If enough people feel otherwise, we can include every Icehouse
game on the wiki to it, but I feel like that would really dilute the
value of the page. What do other people think? Are the criteria I
list for inclusion sufficient?