Welcome back aboard our leaking tub! What a treat to have you. Today Chris is thinking about his Ideal Game, in reference to an old Edge feature he has repeatedly asked the mag to revisit. Floss becomes a pigeon (if only briefly).

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

If you want a different perspective on one of your favourite cities, I’d recommend Pigeon: A Love Story. It’s playable in-browser and allows you to soar above the human world with the goal of finding your perfect pigeon partner somewhere in the big metropolis. A true test of it’s indexicality: I was able to fly over my old London flat. FSN

Interesting things

Are you a game maker, journalist or someone who teaches about games? Dooley Murphy and the Theorycraft research group (which, full disclosure, I am a part of) are running an online survey about how different games practitioners use theory as part of their work. Any and all perspective are welcome - “theory” can mean lots of things! What do you think makes a good theory? Take part here: https://res58.itu.dk/limesurvey/InTheoryInPractice FSN

Games? Not really. But it made my week. When I think of the creative person I wish I was, The Wind is always up there. CD

Essay: My ideal game

One of my favourite Edge features ever, and that is saying something, is a piece from before I wrote for the mag. It looked at current game trends and tried to build a kind of ideal game from all of them. The ideal game would have an open world, and there would be creature collecting, and and and...

And? Well, I spent this morning looking for the issue and I’m pretty sure I can’t find it because I put it away somewhere safe. But it doesn’t matter. Because my point is that I think a lot of us spend the odd moment now and then thinking about what would go into our ideal game. I’m going to waste your time today talking about how my ideal game is shaping up. So here are the elements it absolutely has to have.

Inscrutability: This one is important. My ideal game doesn’t make much sense unless you really know how to play it. This isn’t because I’m elitist; it’s because I like being confused, and then being steadily less confused. I remember looking at Viewtiful Joe screens in Edge and thinking: what even is that? What bit are you controlling? How does it move and stuff? (Don’t say “and stuff.”)

I also think about Drop7 a lot, which is pretty much my ideal game anyway. I played Drop7 for years and people around me never really knew what I was doing with all these numbers and blocks. And the more time I spent with the game, the more I realised that there was still so much to learn for me. I still didn’t really know what I was doing! (Swimming works like this, BTW. You can kind of know front crawl, but you can never truly know everything about front crawl. I am convinced of this.) 

Ultimately, I think the best expression of inscrutability is Dwarf Fortress. I also suspect Dwarf Fortress, is, like, up there with Drop7 for the secret ideal game in the first place.

Knackiness: I learned this word from cardistry, where certain moves just have a knack to them. You can read how to do the Faro Shuffle, for example, but you then need to follow the instructions badly for a few hours (while on holiday at Centre Parcs; just me?) before you can actually do the Faro Shuffle. What changes? How do you move from grating the cards together in a nasty manner to that clear-eyed moment where you get the lovely elastic buzz of slickly interleaving cards? I don’t know. That’s the deep mystery of learning. And it’s the deep mystery of knackiness. And my ideal game has a knacky component.

You can play a version of it on paper: Gosh, today is a stellar day for not being able to find things, but one of my favourite pieces of games writing ever was a PC Gamer article on Into The Breach, which made the point that it should be published in a newspaper each day alongside the chess problems. My ideal game can work on paper like this! Also there is a physical version of it with chunky pieces and a case for carrying it all in your pocket. I wish I could find that PC Gamer piece because it’s really wonderful. Thank you, PC Gamer.

A simple choice that is never that simple: I love XCOM. I am also quite thick. So what I love about XCOM is the game’s complexities - so many of them - are channeled towards my idiot head through such a seemingly simple decision. I can do two actions per turn per unit. So do I want to move and do something else, or do I simply want to move further? I legit think this is my favourite bit of game design in all the time I’ve been writing about games. Because when I engage with it, I somehow become less stupid.

As you play, you’re unintentionally making something: I’m thinking of the patterns that each game of Letterpress used to leave you with. Maps! Strange technical documents. Accidental creativity for people like me, the creatively impaired.

Despite its complexities, it is fascinating to hear about: This is my final biggy. I am going to call it. After years of covering games, meeting brilliant designers, staying at odd hotels and getting stuck in the Black Forest during a snowstorm at least once - I forget the name of the town, but it contained almost nothing but phone shops - my favourite experience in covering games came with my very early conversations over coffee with my dear pal Simon Parkin. 

Simon was playing Demon’s Souls at the time, and he kept describing this game that I could not really get my head around, but that broke all these rules, did all these odd things, and worked in ways that seemed completely bizarre. We would meet each week and I would hear more - more about the game, but more about his discoveries within it. Looking back, I sort of picture him working his way through an ancient tomb of some kind, encountering eldritch wonders. That’s videogames, I guess!

Additional elements that move me in ways I can’t describe: Switch-screen games (is that what they’re called?) where each room of a house or part of a world is a different screen, a la Jet Set Willy. Also, game worlds that wrap around. CD