As she says this, Agnes’s player holds out a card. Carlos supports Agnes, so he says, “It’s true! I heard him arranging the whole thing last week!” He also holds out a card. Brian says, “That’s preposterous. You’re just constructing fantasies!” and holds out his card.

The three turn over their cards. If Agnes wins, any uninvested spectators should roleplay disapproval of Brian. Maybe Agnes issues a final quip or Brian confesses and tries to justify himself. Agnes winning just means that she is the winner of this social exchange, and Brian loses status to her.

If Brian wins, he successfully dismisses Agnes’s accusations, and people roleplay accordingly. I see the cards as a way to resolve the difficult question of “who made the better argument?” or “did the insult stick or fall flat?”

I can even imagine it going into more exotic territory. Say two characters have a duel. They may decide who gets shot as a consent-based thing, but a card pull decides who wins the social fight. Maybe David gets shot in the shoulder and Edgar wins the duel, but because David won the social contest Edgar is regarded as a brute and a bully.

Coming from the perspective of a designer who mostly works with video games, I find it interesting to find how to make story emerge from rules. Sculpting a scenario with a set design would certainly scratch my itch for courtly intrigue, but I’m most interested in creating a system which can create many such situations and enable an ongoing game.

Concept 7 above is definitely relevant. In a game without mechanics or stat tracking, a less socially-gifted player will have a less rewarding time and will fare poorer. And while I believe that aesthetics and mechanics are closely wedded, I still think that interesting mechanics can stand on their own.

This all said, I have very little experience with more artsy LARPs. I may be misunderstanding their potential and their strengths.

(He’s even posting on twitter now! We’ll see if Project Wonderful starts producing extravagant revenues.)

I found Nico’s character interesting, but the “game” part of GTAIV managed to disrupt my suspension of disbelief in him. It’s very cool that you had a different experience.

EDIT: Oh, to clarify, I wasn’t trying to say that an American cannot fully appreciate the character, or that you didn’t do it for being American. I was just trying to say that I meet quite a lot of Niko Bellics where I live.

Personally I found they struck a pretty good balance and I hope they keep that kind of stuff in GTA5 but I see how this could get in the way of some people’s overall experience with the game especially when your a little nitpicky about those kind of things.

I wonder what they’ll do with GTA5. Seems like family plays some kind of role in there so I suspect they won’t go straight back to batshit crazy San Andreas or Vice City.

Although the general mission structure can get tedious over time there’s some really memorable stuff happening later on and they present some extremly well written characters.
Maybe someday put a couple more hours into it until you meet Brucie and the Irish dudes.

Also I spotted The longest journey on your list, however not Dreamfall.
Ever thought of playing that? I actually finished it without having played The longest journey and I still liked it a lot.

Interactive fiction is not gaming, but at the time I felt like that was pretty rare — and I thought it was a cool effect. It’s curious to hear how these Gestalt effects are perhaps detrimental in gaming, by the axiom of “interactivity is the point”.

Just out of interest, have you ever done or thought about doing any collaborations or team projects?

Zork: Nemesis feels like the Zork world was shoehorned in after the fact; it feels like a rather decent horror adventure game with some things named after Zork stuff.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor is an excellent Zork game, and a near-perfect reimagining of the world into graphical adventure form.

As far as performance, they seem comparable; TweenLite’s test says Tweensy’s a tiny bit slower, and Tweensy’s says that TweenLite is a little slower.

The TweenLite family has much better examples and documentation. Tweensy’s basically got one guide page, API docs, and some demos with available source. But it really is simple to pick up.