Photo via IndieCade flickr stream

Hey Sportsfriends fans!

In addition to our big J.S. Joust tournament, we’re also running Hokra and BaraBariBall tournaments this coming week:

– PAX East, Saturday, March 23 - Hokra+BaraBariBall biathlon at the Kickstarter Arcade
– GDC 2013, Tuesday, March 26 - Hokra tournament at the Rumpus Royale

At PAX East, we’re also doing a Sportsfriends panel on Friday, March 22. Moderated by Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera!

More details after the jump.

Hokra+BaraBariBall Biathlon at PAX East

Where: PAX East, Kickstarter Arcade, Room 103
When: Saturday March 23, 10am to 3pm for freeplay, 3pm to 5pm for tournament
Sign-ups: Saturday morning/afternoon, come find us at the Kickstarter Arcade

Join us at the Kickstarter Arcade for some combo Hokra and BaraBariBall action! From 10am to 3pm, we’ll be running both Hokra and BaraBariBall for more informal “free play.” Both Ramiro and Noah will be showing off some new arenas!

Then, from 3pm to 5pm, we’re running an official Hokra + BaraBariBall tournament for teams of two. Sign-ups begin Saturday morning – just come find Ramiro or Noah in the Kickstarter Arcade. If you don’t have a partner, we’ll try to find you one.

In each round, each pairing of opposing teams will face off at both games. If one team wins both games, that team moves on to the next round. If the two teams split the matches, they play a tie-breaking match of one of the two games, selected at random.

Finally, the winning team will face each other in an epic 1v1 match of BaraBariBall. Thanks to our friends at Sony Computer Entertainment America, the winner will be getting a PlayStation Vita (w/16gb memory card)…!

And even if you don’t feel like competing, come spectate and hang out!

Hokra Championships at GDC 2013

Where: GDC 2013, West Hall, Rumpus Royale stand
When: Tuesday March 26, 10am to 3:30pm for freeplay, 4pm to 6pm for tournament
Sign-ups: Tuesday March 26 at 3:30pm

After last year’s Hokra tournament at the 2012 AOPATAD party, we’re thrilled that the game will be back at GDC this year for a 2013 Championships! Full format details to-be-announced, but for now you can read more about the Rumpus Royale here.

Also! On Wednesday March 27, Rumpus Royale will be hosting a tournament for the new 3D version of QWOP by Sportsfriends designer Bennett Foddy. It’s the same version that we’ll be giving to our “Super Sportsfriends” Kickstarter backers!

Heading to PAX East?

We’re running an official Johann Sebastian Joust tournament this Saturday, March 23, from 7pm to 9pm. Get there early if you’re participating!

The tournament is open to 48 players and will feature teams of three! (so, 16 teams)

Sign-ups begin Saturday morning at 10am. Interested players should head to the Console Tournament room to sign-up. It’s best to sign up with a team, but if you don’t have one, sign-up anyway and we’ll try to find you a team (but no promises!)l

Logistical info here, and more info about the tournament structure after the jump.

The tournament will consist of four rounds:

Round 1: Four groups of four teams facing off (3v3v3v3)
Round 2: Two groups of four teams facing off (3v3v3v3)
Semi-Finals: Two groups of two teams facing off (3v3)
Finals: Two teams face off (3v3)

Yup, that’s 12 people in the arena at once! (at least in Rounds 1 and 2). Should be exciting.

In Rounds 1 and 2, the top two teams from each group move on. First, the group plays a match and the winners move on. Then, the losing three teams play another match, and the winner of that moves on as well.

No advanced features (e.g. invincibility), as I want to keep the games relatively simple.

Some additional ground rules that I’ll be refereeing:

– No kicking above knee height
– No excessive roughness or intentional shots to the face
– No leaving the arena
– Player must stop attacking when they’re eliminated
– Must hold controller (or strap) at all times
– If no winner after 5 minutes, Sudden Death w/ high controller sensitivity

I wanted to try teams for this tournament in order to balance out the competitiveness with a dose of camaraderie. Plus, good team coordination is one way to compensate for any height advantage and so forth.

That’s about it! I hope some of you will join us. I haven’t tried this particular format yet, and so I’m excited to see how it goes.

Now that we’re one month into the new year, I want to take a moment to reflect back on my favorite games of 2012.

In 2011, I published this list of my favorite games of that year. I feel like it was a pretty solid list, but this year I wanted to do something a bit different.

All too often, we talk about “games” as objects, systems, products – as readily identifiable things that we can evaluate in the abstract or download onto our computers. That isn’t untrue, but games are also so much more. They’re events; social contexts; play enacted by specific groups of people; particular moments in time.

Colloquially, there’s another meaning of the word “game” – game as a specific instance of play, a specific match, i.e. “Did you see the Knicks game last night?” It’s what Bernie DeKoven means when he talks about the “well-played game.”

In this post, I want to pay tribute to my favorite “games” of 2012 – specific performances, instances, and events that really meant something to me. The list is admittedly idiosyncratic, subjective, and a little self-indulgent. And that’s the way it should be, I feel (um, unless you’re a journalist or something), because games, at their best, are deeply personal affairs. Games generate memories, and I want to share some of mine with you.

(Note that I’ve deliberately left out any games of Johann Sebastian Joust, which I want to deal with in a separate post)

11.) 0space sleepover in Boston

It’s 2am on a Friday night and me, Ramiro, Dan, and Arthur are still in Ramiro’s hotel room, awkwardly sprawled out on his king-size bed. We’re playing 0space – a wickedly fun local multiplayer shooter by Beau “teknopants” Blyth. Rami is there too, but he’s already fast asleep on the couch beside us. The five of us have all traveled to Boston for PAX East, but instead of hitting the conference party circuit, we’ve elected to stay in and play games.

Conferences like PAX East can be exhilarating, but they can also be stressful and exhausting. You give a lecture, or participate on a panel. You exhibit your game, talking to fans and press all day. Maybe you even chase publishers. You try to catch up with all your colleagues (a futile endeavor), and you try make new friends too. You stay out late, drinking, networking, partying. Then you wake up early and do it all again.

Except not this night. This night we’re shunning the rest of the world, and instead we’re basking in the simple joy of 0space, a brilliant 2-4 player game with a superb sense of pacing and a lot of strategic depth. For the first time in years, I feel like I’m at a high school sleepover – one of those nights where you and a few close friends would stay up until sunrise playing GoldenEye, or Super Smash Brothers. I feel like a kid again.

In 2012, I showed my game to hundreds of fans, networked with other developers, did a lot of interviews, and even won several awards. But more than any of those professional achievements, what stands out in my memory are the more interstitial moments – hanging out with friends, shootin’ the shit, playing games. There’s something special about games like 0space, and I hope that there will be more such 0space nights in my future.

(I also hope that Rami won’t fall asleep next time.)

10.) Hokra “World Championships”

Last year at GDC, I participated in the Hokra tournament at the AOPATAD party. By early 2012 I had already played Hokra at a number of indie game parties, and I had become quite skilled at the game. At GDC, I wanted to win. More importantly, I wanted to “test” myself in the heat of public competition, and I wanted to have fun doing so!

I teamed up with FRACT designer Richard Flanagan. Our strategy was simple: on offense we would stick together. I would take the ball, dribbling as best I could, while Richard would try to tackle our opponents to give me as much time as possible in the goal zone. Our strategy proved effective, and we made it all the way to the finals. The finals!

The championship match was a best-of-five affair. We lost the first round, but won the next two. Up 2-1, we were just one round from becoming champions.

Of course, we proceed to lose the next two rounds. Nevertheless, despite our loss, it was a memorable and deeply enjoyable experience.

Local multiplayer games, at their best, take the most positive aspects of teamwork and competition, and celebrate them through spectatorship and performative play. It’s the reason I’m so proud to have launched our Sportsfriends project last year. Competitive local multiplayer games are something worth championing.

9.) Incredible Scrollshooter at the Museum of Art & Design

One thing that disappointed me about a lot of Best of 2012 lists is that so many of them exclusively covered games as products - games that you can go out and download or buy. This is a shame, because one of the most exciting trends of the last few years has been the rising popularity of installation games – games designed for specific events, setups, and places; games that you can’t just download onto your laptop.

In 2012, one of the most straight-up fun games I played was one such installation game – a piece called Infinite Scrollshooter, by Keita Takahashi (of Noby Noby Boy fame) and Ivan Safrin. On the surface of things, Infinite Scrollshooter is a rather generic shmup game for up to 4 players. The twist, though, is that game is played on a whole series of television screens placed around the room. You carry a wireless controller, and when you navigate your ship past the edge of the screen, you have to run a few steps forward to the next screen.

The result is a kind of mashup of Gradius and B.U.T.T.O.N. – a competitive videogame that initially feels familiar, but inevitably devolves into a physical scramble. I should also mention that Babycastles did a superb job building the “course” that housed the screens. For example, check out the wild tunnel through which players had to scamper.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that I wanted to see more installation games like Infinite Scrollshooter on Best Of lists. Immediately, I received a number of objections. One concern was that a game like Infinite Scrollshooter is somewhat “elitist” – after all, it was only up and running for one weekend, and only in New York City. Why bother recommending a game that nobody can play anymore?

As you can imagine, I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. There’s a lot to say on this issue – too much for this blog post. One point I do want to make, though, is that it can be enjoyable to just read about and think about a game in the abstract, even if you can’t play it. One relevant example here is GlitchHiker – a game that I never got to try myself, but a concept that is inspiring to me as a designer and player of games.

So when somebody like me enthusiastically gushes about a game like Infinite Scrollshooter, the point is less about the game itself and more about the possible futures that concept suggests. The critical point here is that you too could build an installation game in your own community. That’s why it’s so important that we continue to talk about games like Infinite Scrollshooter. Just because you can’t distribute or sell a game doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. Quite the opposite, sometimes the best games of them all are the most ephemeral ones – games you and your friends make for your own context.

8.) Full-Contact Tic-Tac-Toe w/ Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo

One of my proudest moments of 2012 was improvising a very physical version of Tic-Tac-Toe, on the spot, during the Game Developers Choice Awards.

The moment was caught on video, and you can totally watch it here.

The story is, Stephen Totilo (Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku) was interviewing every developer who won a Game Developers Choice Award. But instead of just interviewing them, he decided to give each of them a challenge. He’d ask each winner to re-design Tic-Tac-Toe, on the spot.

Stephen did not know what he was getting himself into when he asked me.

Riffing on my work designing physical games like B.U.T.T.O.N., I immediately thought about Around the World – a party game played around a ping pong table (in Around the World, you have to run to the other side of the table after you take your turn). Stephen happened to be sitting at a circular table, and so I improvised the following mod: after drawing your ‘X’ or ‘O’ you have to run one full revolution around the table before you can take your next turn. The catch is, if you can somehow overtake your opponent in the race around the table (e.g. by wrestling them out of the way), you can take two turns in a row.

Predictably, I ended up roughhousing Stephen – the editor of Kotaku! – into the table.

And the cherry on top, so to speak, was Stephen’s final exasperated remark: “oh, go innovate somewhere else!”


7.) Acro-yoga with Marek

It’s a sunny April afternoon in Berlin, and I’m walking through Tempelhof Park with my friends Joanna, Natalie, and Marek (the artist behind award-winning indie game Spirits). Marek tell us he has a surprise for us, but he won’t tell us what.

Finding an open space on the grass, Marek gets down on his back, sticks up his legs, and tells me to lean on his feet.

Um, what?

Marek begins to guide me through a complex sequence of body contortions. Finally, as if by magic, I find myself hovering over Marek, supported by nothing more than his legs. I feel like I’m flying, and the experience is equal parts astounding and exhilarating.

The activity is called acro-yoga, and Marek happens to be an excellent guide. Joanna and I took turns “riding” Marek’s legs, attempting to hold precarious yet majestic poses for as long as we can. Acro-yoga is as much about trust and communication as it is about physical skill. Like the best motion control games, playground games, and sports, it gives you the kind of “rush” that comes from tackling challenges that are simultaneously mental and physical in nature.

Call it what you want, but the whole activity felt rather game-like to me. One of my most memorable experiences of 2012.

6.) Late-night Cart Life

I was absolutely thrilled to see Richard Hofmeier’s “retail simulation” game Cart Life make IGF this year. Technically, the game came out in 2011, but I would argue that it only finally “came into its own” in 2012. If you follow me on Twitter, you know just how impressed I am with the game.

There’s no way I could write about Cart Life as eloquently as Joel from Electron Dance has already, so for the most part I’ll defer to his essays on the game.

(I also recommend you read this superb Eurogamer interview with Richard)

What I do want to mention, though, is that I distinctly remember the night I first tried Cart Life. I was on vacation, and I stayed up most of the night playing through Melanie’s story. As JP LeBreton so eloquently put it, to play Cart Life is to feel “cracked across the jaw by moments of blinding empathy.”

It’s true that Cart Life employs game system, mechanics, and repetitive interactions to create a media experience that feels fresh and original. However, what I remember most are the little vignettes and beautiful animations sprinkled across the game – the conversations you have with your daughter; the smalltalk you make with your patrons; the nightmares Melanie suffers each night; that heart-wrenching cutscene of Melanie preparing for bed each night.

Cart Life stands as a real triumph in the pursuit of videogames as sophisticated cultural form. You can download it here. Give yourself the gift of your own late night session.

Oh, and don’t miss Richard’s irreverent Cart Life trailer from IndieCade.

5.) Linsanity

It’s some ungodly hour of the night, and I’m still up, sitting in my room in Copenhagen, streaming the Knicks-Lakers game on my laptop. I’ve stayed up to watch the game because basketball phenomenon Jeremy Lin is at the apex of his improbable rise from bench warmer to superstar, and he is torching the Lakers. It’s like watching a real-life fairytale.

The story of Jeremy Lin is as inspiring as it is unbelievable. An Asian-American point guard – out of Harvard, of all universities – comes out of nowhere to assert his gutsy, fast-tempo style of basketball on the NBA. Though short-lived, the era of “Linsanity” was particularly enjoyable for me as a lifelong Knicks fan. For the first time since 1999, the Knicks were finally relevant again.

In that aforementioned, now-classic Knicks-Lakers game, there is this one moment in the 4th quarter where Jeremy Lin sinks a dagger three from the corner. Madison Square Garden explodes, and sportscaster Mike Breen exclaims: “The Jeremy Lin show continues here at Madison Square Garden!” Jeremy Lin ends up scoring an eye-popping 38 points, and the Knicks win.

(Also see his absolutely fearless game winner against Toronto)

No matter what Lin does with the rest of career (sadly, he signed with the Rockets in the off-season), Knicks fans will always remember his unlikely transformation into New York City hero. It’s the kind of story that sports and games so excel at producing. It’s also a useful reminder of how important spectatorship is to the past, present, and future of games, as well as how inseparable games are from issues of race, identity, and culture.

4. Proteus: “Frog God” trampoline mod

I already featured exploration game Proteus in my Best of 2011 list. But I would argue that our trampoline mod (affectionately dubbed the “Frog God” mod), is something different. Or, at least it felt that way to me.

This past August, a group of friends and I headed to the Danish countryside for a week-long game-making retreat. My roommate Christoffer and I brought with us two 4-meter (!) trampolines. The plan was to spend the week making trampoline-controlled games.

While Bennett, Florian, and George worked on their games, I worked on transforming the trampolines into Unity-enabled game controllers. Using two gryoscopes sown underneath each trampoline, I wrote a program that would detect when the player bounced on the trampoline, and how hard they bounced.

Among several other games (see here, here), George prepared a mod of Proteus in which you play as one of the frogs (thanks to Ed Key for the support!) The frog bounces when you do, and its jump height depends on the strength of the jump. Holding two wireless controllers, one in each hand, you use buttons to control which direction your avatar looks and moves. We set it up at night, with a large projection of the game world on the side of the house.

The experience was nothing short of magical. David Kanaga’s music and sounds melded beautifully into the soundscape of the real summer evening – the sound of the nearby sea, the crickets, the wind. Under a starry sky, we took turns jumping, giant grins plastered across our faces. I distinctly remember one moment with George on the trampoline, Marie and I gazing on in total wonder.

Jumping on that trampoline in that context, or even just watching someone else do it, was an experience of unbridled joy. And that joy was further amplified by a sense of accomplishment. We had hacked this thing together (um, aside from the game itself), and boy did the fruits of our labor taste good.

(Honorable mention: the Proteus chill-out room at the AOPATAD party, which fostered a similar experience of wonder)

3. Kaizo Mario 3

You’ve seen Kaizo Mario (a.k.a. “Asshole Mario”) before, right?

In 2012, fans were blessed with a new, third installment of that brutal, maniacal mod of Super Mario World. It is hilarious – one of the very funniest games of the year.

I do use the word “game” here in the “particular instance” sense of the word. Yes, Kaizo Mario 3 is a game you can download and play in your emulator. But, as I write about at length in Chapter 2 of my PhD dissertation, Kaizo Mario also stands as a testament to one specific playthrough. Supposedly, the series was designed by T. Takemoto for his friend and expert player R. Kiba. Kaizo Mario, at its core, is an adversarial matchup of a designer vs. a player.

The “Asshole Mario” video series does an excellent job conveying this adversarial matchup. What’s so brilliant about the videos is that they step us through the story (whether fictional or not) of Kiba’s triumphs and tribulations. As viewers, we can really feel Kiba’s frustration every time he falls for another one of Takemoto’s traps. The tragicomic nature of Kiba’s struggles is nowhere more clear than when the videos devolve into death montages of failure after failure, juxtaposed in rapid succession. Like all the best slapstick comedy, the Asshole Mario 3 videos elicit a strange combination of empathy and black humor.

The highlight of the new installment is surely Stage 9 – an ingenious series of challenges that require a keen sense of observation and a superhuman sense of timing. And don’t miss the final boss fight, which stands as an unbelievably impressive feat of platforming skill. Like, you can’t help but laugh when the Magikoopa appears.

The other takeaway here is that you don’t actually have to play a game yourself to enjoy it. I’ll probably never play Kaizo Mario 3 myself, and yet it’s still one of my favorite games of the year. Spectatorship provides its own pleasures, and we should remember that games are consumed and enjoyed in a variety of ways.

2. Spelunky ritual with Nifflas

I’ve already written at length about my Spelunky ritual with my friend Nifflas, here. Suffice to say, those daily (um, nightly) Spelunky adventures are some of the fondest gaming memories I have. Our ritual speaks to the way games can help nurture traditions, personal victories, friendships.

And, for the record, I do think Spelunky is a fantastic spectator game. Like my hero Hannah Arendt puts it: “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”

1.) Slap Poker at the Game Developers Choice Awards

I’ve never felt very comfortable at award shows. Awards are a great honor, of course, but professional achievements are never as meaningful or satisfying as those “smaller” moments of genuine person-to-person connection. That might sound cheesy, but I swear it’s the truth.

So while I can understand why other devs would recite their heartfelt thanks on the IGF/GDCA stage, I can’t fully relate. I certainly felt grateful to a great many people, but I didn’t feel like I could adequately express that gratitude on stage, in less than a minute. Instead, I started thinking of ways I might subvert the typical “red carpet” proceedings, and do so in a way that was positive and fun for everyone involved.

Initially, I had thought that we might play J.S. Joust on stage if we won any awards. But we had already done that at IndieCade 2011, and it felt a little too self-promotional. I decided that the best thing to do would be to run a simple folk game that I could explain in less than 30 seconds. I immediately knew that the game had to be Slap Poker, a raucous, spectator-friendly game by my friend Ramiro Corbetta. The great thing about folk games like Slap Poker is that they’re portable, theatrical, and easy to explain.

We almost decided against it. In fact, we almost skipped out on the ceremony altogether to go setup at that night’s AOPATAD party! But in a last minute gametime decision, I went and found Ramiro and told him that we would indeed stage the game in the unlikely scenario that J.S. Joust won. After all, I hadn’t won any IGF awards, and surely I wouldn’t win a GDCA award, right?

Wrong:

Of everything I did in 2012 – and that includes completing my PhD – I am most proud of that moment playing Slap Poker on stage. It felt great to have a little fun with my moment in the spotlight, and it felt even better to use that opportunity to show the world a brilliant game by one of my good friends.

Because ultimately, gratitude isn’t just something expressed in words – it’s also a way of living, being, playing.

(And because sometimes, the best way to thank someone is to slap them in the face! And kick them, too.)

Bonus!

And, because I can’t resist, here are some other games (in the more familiar sense of the word) that left a lasting impression on me in 2012: BaraBariBall, Get on Top, CLOP, VESPER.5, Glitch Tank, Dyad, LUFTRAUSERS, Knytt Underground, TENNNES, McPixel, Gorogoa, Recurse, Clairvoyance, Crokinole.

Last year, I posted a list of my favorite music of 2011. I guess I should post my 2012 favorites too, huh? Better late than never!

Favorite Tracks of 2012:

1. Discoverer – Circular Motherboard [retro-futuristic]
2. Panabrite – Index of Gestures [kosmische, synth]
3. Shigeto – Huron River Drive [beat]
4. Discoverer – Data Pool [retro-futuristic]
5. Lone – Stands Tidal Waves [album preview] [ambient]
6. Lone – New Colour [album preview] [dance]
7. Efterklang – Dreams Today [preview/video] [indie]
8. Synkro – Memories of Love [r&b-ambient]
9. Studiocanoe – Discipline [album samples] [indie]
10. James Blackshaw – Her Smoke Rose Up Forever [acoustic guitar]

Ten more tracks (and more music favorites) after the jump!

11. Matthew Halsall – Journey In Satchidananda [jazz]
12. Greg Foat Group – For a Breath I Tarry [jazz]
13. Ametsub – Sun of Madrid [ambient]
14. Ametsub – Muffled Blue [electronica]
15. Machinedrum – From Now On [album samples] [dance]
16. Waking Aida – Underwater Level [post-rock]
17. Dam Mantle – Blueberry [beat]
18. Disasterpeace – Nocturne [videogame]
19. The Dead Texan – The Adversary of Evil Budd [ambient]
20. Matthew Bourne – Infinitude [piano]

Favorite Music Video of 2012:

Favorite Label of 2012:

Digitalis Records

What a year for Digitalis! My two favorite albums of 2012, Panabrite’s Soft Terminals and Discoverer’s Tunnels, were both on the Digitalis imprint. And beyond those two albums, Digitalis released an impressive range of new forward-thinking music and wild reissues (including this Jean Piché record). Bravo!

Favorite Mix of 2012:

David Kanaga – Proteus GameCity 7 Mix [tracklist & background]

Alice Coltrane, Bibio, Brian Eno, J.S. Bach, Ravel, and more – interspersed with snippets of music from Proteus composer David Kanaga. It doesn’t get much better than that, folks.

Favorite Music Discovery of 2012:

Alice Coltrane – Turiya Sings (1982)

Of all the music I learned about in 2012, the album that made the biggest impact on me is this obscure gem from Alice Coltrane. I learned about the album through a tweet from Shigeto and was immediately spellbound. It’s difficult to even classify the music – not quite jazz, not quite chant, not quite new age, but something wholly original, and deeply spiritual. I was already a big Alice Coltrane fan, but this album surely cements her place as one of the most versatile musicians of the 20th centuries.

My personal favorite track is “Yamuna Tira Vihari” but the whole thing is stunning. Required listening!

Sunset in the valley of the Deerman.

Concept work for Alpenland the comic book and video game. Alpenland loosely connects to Where is my Heart?

(Alpenland Concept Part 5 here)

(Thanks Ian for the gif suggestion)

Now we get to finish all four [Sportsfriends] games and share them with all of you!

It truly was a communal effort. Just when things were looking grim, all of you helped fuel a big come-from-behind push. Some of you tweeted, others increased their pledge, others even published enthusiastic articles and videos about the games.

Suffice to say, we’re humbled and honored and, well, totally floored.

We want to thank all of you for all your enthusiasm and support. Special thanks to all our colleagues who gave us advice and contributed games, video testimonials, footage, photos, designs, music, help at events, and other support. We also want to thank the team at Sony’s Foster City office for championing the concept and making the PlayStation side of the project possible.

Looking to the future, we’re so, so excited to get these four games finished, and to share them with the broader world. If you contributed at the early alpha tier or above, expect to hear from us in the coming days about your Hokra and J.S. Joust builds. We plan to get those out this month, and then BaraBariBall in January. And then more rewards after that!

Your Best Sportsfriends Forever,

- Bennett, Ramiro, Noah, Doug -

In case you missed the news, we’ve finally announced our release plans for Johann Sebastian Joust. We hope to release the game as a part of Sportsfriends – a compendium of four sports-themed local multiplayer games.

The other games include Hokra, BaraBariBall, and a new version of Pole Riders.

We plan to bring the package to PlayStation 3, and then PC/Mac/Linux.

We’re crowd-funding Sportsfriends on Kickstarter in order to raise funds to finish the games and hire expert programmers to port them. We’d love any support you feel like giving us!

We’re very excited about Sportsfriends! I’m especially excited to be working with the designers of the other three games – Ramiro Corbetta, Noah Sasso, and Bennett Foddy. I’m a huge fan of all three designers, and of all three of their games. I’ve written before about my collaborations with Bennett, and I’ve also written about how much I love Hokra. BaraBariBall and Pole Riders are brilliant too, and so I’m immensely excited to help release them to the general public.

It’s been a long road determining what we can and should do with Johann Sebastian Joust. Eventually, it became clear to us that we’d have to release the game ourselves. As it turns out, the game was just a little too weird for traditional publishers.

As we decided how to self-release the game, I came to realize that J.S. Joust in part of a broader movement – a new wave of independent games that champion local multiplayer, performance, and spectatorship. Even though J.S. Joust is the only motion-controlled game in the Sportsfriends package, it shares the same “spirit” as the other three games. That is, all four of us care deeply about local multiplayer, and what happens in front of the screen, between the human beings playing and spectating. So we’re proud to join forces!

There’s a lot more information on our Kickstarter page. We’ll also be posting lots more updates about the games and our rewards on that page. So, check it out and let us know if you have any questions. And spread the word – let’s kickstart this sucker!

When making sketches you often have to visualize an idea out of your head, which is both fun and frustrating, but more fun the more you draw. The following sketches show the first draft of B.U.T.T.O.N. characters, an idea for the musical gardens for Mutazione, some drafts for a Where is my Heart? box art which we never ended up using, and a ridiculous game idea sketch about riding a bike with balloon wheels in a bouncy landscape.

Big news – we’re opening a new outpost of Die Gute Fabrik in New York City!

Er, well, that makes us sound larger than we actually are. By “opening an outpost” I mean that I’m personally moving back to America (my home country). Nils and Christoffer are staying here in Copenhagen, and we’ll be working together remotely.

I’m moving for a whole variety of reasons. I was born and raised in New Jersey, and so after over a decade in California and Denmark, I’m finally returning “home.”

But the move is also motivated by some professional reasons. In the last few years, New York City has become a real hotbed of game dev talent. As far as I’m concerned, NYC is the place to be for cutting-edge game development these days. Institutions like Babycastles, Eyebeam, Come Out & Play, and the NYU Game Center are running innovative events and programs that are galvanizing community and building bridges between games and other cultural domains like music, art, theater, and academia. And so many of my colleagues and favorite game designers are in NYC. Suffice to say, I want in on that mix!

If you’re in NYC and want to say hello, drop us a line! I should land next month, just in time to speak at NYU’s PRACTICE conference. Exciting!

Time to teach another one of my favorite folk/playground games!

Standoff is a simple game for two or more players – ideally a group of 5 to 10 people. It’s kind of like Rock-Paper-Scissors meets John Woo action flick.

I learned the game back in college, through my then-roommate John Shedletsky. The game and its variants go by many different names, but “Standoff” is the name that I use these days. In this post, I’m going to explain several variations of the game, including my own favorite version.

Standoff – Version #1 (Recommended)

Players stand in a circle, facing each other. The game plays out as a series of rounds.

Before each round, each player pantomimes a gun with one hand, placing it in an imaginary holster by their waist.

Then, on the count of three, all players simultaneously act out one of three choices:

1. Shoot an opponent – point your imaginary gun at an opponent of your choice
2. Shoot yourself – point your imaginary gun at yourself, touching your temple
3. Shoot nobody – point your imaginary gun at the sky

Players then hold their pose while they collectively figure out who has been shot.

Shooting an opponent kills that opponent… unless they are shooting themselves. In that case, your attacking shot is reflected and you die. Note that shooting yourself reflects all bullets fired at you, so you could potentially kill a whole slew of attackers.

If you shoot yourself but nobody aims at you, you actually end up shooting yourself and you die. Note that you do survive if you reflected any attackers.

If two players aim at one another, both players die. Note that it is also possible to die in a whole circular chain of people shooting one another.

Finally, shooting the air serves as a kind of conservative move, played if you think all your opponents might try to shoot themselves.

Any players who were killed are eliminated from the game, and the remaining players continue to the next round. The game continues until only one player remains. That player is the winner. Also note that it’s possible for all players to die, in which case there are no winners!

As with most folk games, performative embellishments are encouraged for maximum fun. For example, my friends and I often pretend to reload our imaginary guns before each round, with the appropriate gesture and sound effect and everything.

Even within this particular version, there are a few modifications you might want to try. In my own personal favorite variation, each player gets two guns, one on each hand. After all, it feels way more badass to wield dual pistols! In this mode, you can either aim both weapons at the same target, or point them at different targets. We typically play that two guns beats one gun – both when firing at one another, and when firing at someone who is shooting themselves. Obviously, though, you could tweak these particulars to your own liking. Another way to play the double pistol variant is to simply make each player lose one of their guns each time they are hit. Effectively, this means that each player has two lives (though they become less powerful after losing a life).

Standoff – Version #2 (sometimes called “James Bond”)

This version of the game works similarly – players stand in a circle and try to be the last player standing. However, the three actions you can take differ in this version:

1. Shoot – point your imaginary guns at an opponent of your choice
2. Reload – holster your two guns by you waist
3. Block – place your two arms in an x-shape across your chest

Note that in this version, you almost always play with dual pistols, because you’ll have to use both of your arms anyway for the block gesture. However, in the standard version, you can’t direct your guns at different targets or actions.

In this version, each gun can only hold one bullet. That’s why the reload action exists – you have to reload before you can shoot again. Players themselves are responsible for remembering who is loaded and who isn’t.

Blocking, as is probably obvious, successfully deflects an attack. However, blocking does not reflect an attack, like shooting yourself does in Version #1 (see above).

The key decision in this version is gambling on when to reload. This choice is especially foregrounded when only two players remain, one loaded and the other not. The loaded player only wants to shoot when they think the unloaded player will reload.

(EDIT: indie dev Alan Hazelden points out that, from a game theoretical point of view, this version of the game can “deadlock” in a stalemate. If two players remain, and only one is loaded, the unloaded player shouldn’t ever reload until the loaded player shoots. In practice, most players want to avoid this situation, and will still chance a reload just for the fun of it. Nevertheless, it is true that more “serious” players may refuse to budge. The bazooka mod I mention in the next paragraph does suggest one possible fix, and I’m sure there are many other creative solutions!)

As in Variation #1, there are lots of possible variations here. My friend Tim Garbos taught me one variation where reloading your gun three times gets you a bazooka! A bazooka can shoot through a block, but is beaten by a (faster) regular bullet. In this variation, part of the challenge is to keep track of your opponents’ reload counts.

Comparing Version #1 and Version #2

As I see it, a big disadvantage of Version #2 is having to remember who is loaded and who isn’t. In the chaos of battle, it can be easy to forget – even your own status! On the flip side, one might argue that this is an advantage – that keeping track of the current game “state” is one of the intended challenges of the game.

A main disadvantage of Version #1 is the lack of narrative plausibility. That is to say, why does shooting yourself reflect bullets? It doesn’t really make sense, and some players get hung up on that lack of coherence. Then again, I would argue that the strange game logic is actually an advantage. My friend Dick Hogg (of Honeyslug fame) put it best:

I actually like the wrongthink of it. [...] It makes no sense but it has the authentic feeling of weird warped logic that you get in kids games, playground games etc.

Another key selling point of Version #1 is that shooting yourself feels fun. Even just physically, holding up your finger to your temple makes the gambit seem all the gutsier, as if you were playing Russian Roulette or something.

However, the point is ultimately to find a particular ruleset that you (and your friends) like best. Try improvising your own modifications! And let me know if you invent any particularly good ones.

Notes:

1. Special thanks to Dick Hogg and Ricky Haggett for nudging me to finally post these rules.

2. Boardgame aficionados may note that Standoff is somewhat similar to the commercial game Ca$h ‘n Gun$. Indeed, you can actually see Ca$h ‘n Gun$ on the table in the photo at the top of this post. Though I love Standoff, Ca$h ‘n Gun$ is certainly worth playing too. One of the selling points of Ca$h ‘n Gun$ is that it comes with six foam guns. Those kinds of props make a huge difference – the physicality of holding a toy gun does make the game more fun. Moreover, Ca$h ‘n Gun$ features some more complex rules (i.e. special roles).