Someone I care about deeply has become obsessed with this web game. He plays it for hours at a time and says it's all the fun of building towers in an rts condensed into one little game. To see the enemy approach and getting annihilated by your mighty defenses, brilliantly placed at strategic key locations. He can't stop staring at the hi-score list and mumbles that it's brilliant that you can compete with people you know by entering a group name. He's been playing it for hours, a web game! Surely that can't be normal. Whatever shall I do?

Yeah, I should try it myself and beat his hi-score. That'll teach him.

I have played what the makers claim to be "the world's most inaccessible game" - Game Over!. I think it was the second game in six months time that I could actually play on my Linux platform which is a bit ironic. Anyway - the game was made by "Universally Accessible Games" a research project in Greece and it's a space invaders clone designed to illustrate several guidelines and principles one should follow to make a game as accessible as possible. As you might have imagined it does this by violating these guidelines. It is fun to play in it's own way. Even though starting the game is probably the very best part of it:

Press the following shortcut to start:
Ctrl + Shift + Enter +Page Up +F3 + F12 + Right Arrow

The thing is that most of the principles presented should already be pretty obvious to anyone making a game. No - you shouldn't write the instructions in Swahili if your players don't speak it . You should write them in a form that's clear and easily understandable for everyone. Everyone gets that, the difficulty lies in the next step - how to achieve just that.

Other principles are hard or almost impossible to implement in every game, like this one: "provide control over game speed". There are lots of games where the speed of the game are such a big part of the core design that you can't have the player adjusting it without major impact on the design. Not even mentioning online games where the speed necessarily have to be the same for everyone playing it.

To an outsider it might seem like World of Warcraft have succeeded in being a game that never ends. Two years after release people are still playing it, a lot of them people who didn't spend all their time playing other mmorpgs before it. But with the recent expansion I think that a lot of people in the game realized the opposite - that this is not a game to play forever. We could finally all see that it doesn't matter how much content is added, it's still the same game and will probably stay that way. There are a lot of people who are starting to feel done with WoW and that are looking for a worthy successor. A WoW-killer.

We are just days away from the release of Lord of the Rings Online in the US. Sadly, after playing the a bit on the beta I don't think this is where WoW is going to meet it's death. Not that there isn't any interesting new stuff in LotRO. The monster play where you set out in monster form to hunt down players seems promising for example. But it doesn't have that ability to instantly capture you that WoW had. I'm talking about that special power that had you start up the game - blink - and then realize that it was 17 hours later and you probably should eat and sleep in life as well, but you didn't really want to. Then there are those small unpolished details in LotRO that hurts the oh-so-important first impression. Like the elves. These are the creatures that Tolkien described as being so graceful that they are able to walk on a gravel path without making any sound. I made an elf character in LotRO and she runs like a bandy-legged kangaroo. The proportions of her body also feels wrong somehow. Seems like we wont see WoW's murderer emerge until Warhammer Online or maybeAge of Conan.

To make a truly endless games I think some new ideas are needed - or at least a better use of old ones. For example: a story line that is constantly progressing and that every player in the game can feel that they are really taking part of. The tricky part is then of course to make thousands of players all feel important to the story at the same time. Another way to make the game never ending could be to let players contribute to the content to a high extent. Then there would surely be so much ever-changing content in the world that you could never see it all. The risk with this is to end up with something like Second Life where there are lots of stuff but all of it is ugly and there is no uniformity to the world. Something would have to be done to prevent that from happening.

All in all I'm not so sure it really would be healthy for me if the game that never ends actually is created someday, but I can't help but hoping for it anyway.

This is great. I get to buy not one but two new games for my Nintendo DS with a perfectly clean conscience intact. They have to be a good investment - they are educational . I admit, I already own that language game with a giant blue bird - Talkman for the PSP and I rarely used it. But it was more of a dictionary than a learning aid really.

The two new games are both about learning Chinese characters - kanji as they are called in Japan. That should be a good idea for me since learning Chinese signs is good both for brushing up my Japanese and will come in handy in Hong Kong since most of the characters have about the same meaning in both countries - at least that's what I've heard and hope for.

The first one is called Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun and is meant to help out Japanese children just starting school with learning kanji. In Japan you often see these seven-year-olds sitting on the subway practicing their kanji with small paper notes. It was about time that they were provided with a little more hi-tech solution. The Nintendo DS comes to the rescue and it is of course perfect for practicing kanji with it's touch screen and pen. Check out the commercial for an injection of Japanese cheerfulness.


Game number two might suit you better if you have trouble identifying with a Japanese seven-year-old. Here you get to be a kung-fu master. Better eh? A kung-fu master who defeats opponents by demonstrating his awe-inspiring kanji skills apparently.This is Kanji-ken where you write the correct kanji on the touch screen after reading the phonetic description of it. A concept that reminds me of the home made RPG Slime Forest where battles also are won by knowing your alphabets. In slime forest you start out with learning hiragana and katakana - the two phonetic alphabets of Japanese that you probably need to know before you start practicing with these two DS games - could be a good start if you can live with the graphics and have a sense of humor - there are some really funny RPG clichés in it.

I have already been through the slime forest myself so I'm ready for some kung-fu action!

I seem to have thrown away all my old principles because just as I thought I'd never start playing a paladin in World of Warcraft I never thought I would use a level guide. A level guide tells you exactly what quests to do and don't do and the exact order in which to do them in order to level up as quickly as possible. Sometimes it even tells you to go and die on purpose because that's the quickest way to get back to town. The thing that surprises me the most is how much fun it is to follow strict instructions while playing WoW. I think it has got to have something to do with flow.

Wikipedia says:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

But there's one important factor in achieving flow that isn't in that description and that is to always have clear goals. That's something the level guide gives you. Now you do this and then you do that. No doubt and no hesitation about what to do. It means always knowing that you are doing the most optimal thing you could be doing and always with a feeling of progression, of getting better, even more so than when leveling normally since you can tell that this is a more optimized way of doing it.

I wouldn't recommend using a leveling guide the first time you level up a character, then it is clearly more fun to explore, to actually listen to what the npcs has to say and perhaps get a bit immersed in the world. But when you're doing it for the third or fifty-third time it can be a lot of fun - if you can feel the flow.