Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The first rule of working in the games industry is: There's never enough time to play all the games you want to play

Sigh.

After finishing Afro Samurai a couple of weeks ago, I haven't had much time for "big bite" gaming. My panel at Casual Connect went well (I'll post a link to slides when they're available) and I've been keeping busy with clients trying to get their games out for the holiday season.

My gaming needs have mostly been filled with "small bite" experiences. Mostly Facebook games like Farmville, Farkle, Scramble, Wordscraper, and Backgammon. And I've sprinkled in some short doses of Plants vs. Zombies (mostly playing through the campaign again and trying to harvest some new plants in my water and night gardens).

Scramble, Wordscraper, and Backgammon make sense to me. I love anagram games -- and I'm willing to play Backgammon with folks who want to extract revenge on me for beating them soundly at said-anagram games. I truly suck at Backgammon.

Farmville is one of those Zynga games that I'm basically playing as an exercise in learning more about how this kind of sim/god/world building game integrates into users' social networking workflow. Farkle is just a silly addiction that I can't seem to shake.

Seriously, though, it's time for me to recommit to gaming again. August is almost here -- and I wonder if I need to commit to a game (and a post) a day. It will be hard to pull off (I have a bunch of work and pleasure travel) but if I stay committed, I can make it happen.
  • Keep my "at home" time restricted to console games (my coverage of both retail releases and marketplace releases on all three systems is woefully inadequate).
  • Keep my "on the road" gaming confined to laptop, DS, and my wife's iPhone platforms.
I may even need to set up a spreadsheet and a schedule.

Maybe I'm on to something.




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