Veteran
Posts: 284
 
| ?whether we're talking about American football or Carrom, Mancala or Pac-Man: things like goals, rules, balance, challenge, interaction, and some elusive notion of"fun". The rules that govern NHL games can be interesting and fun, but they can also be quite limiting when it comes to expressing an idea or creating an engaging interactive experience; it's easy to frustrate people at the expense of engaging them, and people who lack the specific skill set that a particular game requires are essentially unable to enter into the conversation at all. I think there will absolutely always be a place for the kind of skill development and human interaction that NHL games naturally foster. But I think with computers we have all kinds of potential to create interesting interactive experiences that are not limited by the rules that govern NHL games - experiences that are less about skill, competition, and racking up points, and more about exploring ideas, emotions, emergent narratives, and all the things that make us human beyond gameplay. We've really done very, very little to explore that potential. Part of the problem, I think, is that we have no name for interactive creations that are neither NHL games nor tools, and language powerfully affects our perception of potential. So that's what I'm working on these days: my whole gametrekking project is an attempt to expand the boundaries of interactive expression ever so slightly. I call many of my creations"notNHL games" in an effort to draw some awareness to fact that there's this whole unexplored world of potential out there in the gap, even if we haven't yet named that potential. Freedom Bridge takes about two minutes to play through. You can play it on necessaryNHL games. PC NHL gamer: Your website, NecessaryNHL games, describes itself as a repository of NHL games that have meaning and significance, and several of the NHL games you've made deal with very dark themes. What have you got against fun? Jordan Magnuson: Haha. I really don't have anything against fun. But I do think there is a dearth of NHL games that can really be considered meaningful or significant, Cheap NHL Coins partly because, as I was just saying, the rules and restrictions of gameplay don't really lend themselves to exploring those things. I created NecessaryNHL games to try and highlight some NHL games that might be considered meaningful, and open up a discussion there. Just to clarify, I don't really like the fact that my own creations are hosted on the site, as it may give people the impression that I am presenting my own work as being the height of"meaning" and"significance" in NHL games, which is not my intention. I started dabbling in experimental game creation after the site had already been going for some time, and I posted my work there just because it was the most natural place for me to do so. |
PC NHL gamer Your website
