Delays, delays. There is no wizard melting yet, sorry.

The onslaught of GDC and a bunch of Europeans rampaging through my life, work, and house have put a halt to normal activities. Hopefully GDC will result in my writing up some stuff though, as the show’s been incredibly fun so far, and a few panels have been extremely entertaining, occasionally mind-blowing. In particular is one lecture today by Clint Hocking on the different elements that are explored in video games (both as players and designers), splitting them up into spatial exploration (the game’s environment and world) and systems exploration (discovering a game’s rules, limits, basic mechanics), but going from there to propse how games could (and should) involve self exploration as well.

I’ve so far made Hocking’s talk sound lame and trite, but it was some truly amazing stuff. It immediately triggered mad discussion between Marek, Steve and myself about the talk and its implications, my possibly misguided insisting that Suspension of Disbelief is somehow involved, and other good video-gamey things that I rarely get to talk about despite working every day at a game company. And, it was the only panel to do such a thing at the show so far. So, clearly good stuff.

I’m still processing… and apparently falling asleep… at the moment, but God willing I’ll put up some impressions from the show in the near future.