The January 1st deadline is approaching. The challenge: provide an image that makes fun of the major publishers in some fashion. Click here for the submissions so far. There's a $100 prize for the winner.

The Rules: Image must be no larger than 640x480, and provided as a GIF, JPEG, or PNG. You retain all rights to your work, except that you grant us the right to display the image on our site as part of the contest. We reserve the right to reject something that's particularly gross, libelous, or otherwise illegal, but otherwise, pretty much anything goes.

Manifesto's First Exclusive Game

Designed by Chris Bateman (who produced Kult: Heretic Kingdoms), Play with Fire is a highly unusual platform puzzle game in which you play a giant ball of fire--and burn things down.

Bateman (who blogs here) is something of a game design theorist, and the author of 21st Century Game Design. Play With Fire is, as a result, an unusual combination of a rigorous and theoretical approach to game design--along with a firm intention to create an easily graspable, intuitive game capable of appealing to a broad audience.

In Play With Fire you do three things: move, jump--and burn. Each level presents you with a structure composed of different kinds of materials, ranging from unburnable stone to a variety of others that burn more or less easily.

Another Adventure from the Creator of The Shivah

The Blackwell Legacy is the first case in a miniseries of games that stars a medium named Rosangela Blackwell and her spirit guide Joey Mallone. Their mission, it seems, is to assist tormented spirits and investigate supernatural goings on. They don't understand why they are thrown together, but they do the best they can.

The duo's first case will involve a series of suicides at a local university. Something unnatural has forced these students to kill themselves, and nobody knows why. Rosangela, who is just coming to terms with her new status as a medium, finds herself cast as the unwilling detective in this gruesome mystery.

Look for it soon... And in the meantime, check out the screenshots.

So the folks at the Themis Group have implemented a little Flash game called Death Star Designer, as a promotion for Ubi's Star Wars: Lethal Alliance. I like the basic concept (who doesn't want to build the galaxy's most powerful battle station?); the basic implementation, though is "spreadsheet + leaderboard." You've got a trillion credits to spend (flashback to GDW's old Trillion Credit Squadron, and I'm sure that's intentional--Alex Macris, Themis's CEO, is an old tabletop gamer). After you spend them, you 'submit' your plans and get a report on flaws in the design. In a sense, it's no win; even if you plan optimally, there are always going to flaws (I'm sorry, Lord Vader, but a trillion credits isn't enough...acck... choke). But your design is scored, and you can see how it stacks up against other designs.

Richard Garfield once said that you could design a compelling game just by tacking a leaderboard onto 'rock-paper-scissors,' and I suspect he's right.

Some new images for the contest are up in the "Make Fun" image gallery. Keep them coming! And if interested in participating, the rules are here.

In other news, check out Game Garage's Great Games Experiment site, currently in beta; it's a sort of social-networking site for gamers, with user-provided descriptions of all sorts of games. A little thin yet, but this looks potentially to be a great way to discover games you'll like, as well as (once more contributions are made) a real potential challenger to Moby Games as the first place to turn to when looking for historical information about older titles.

The Challenge: Come up with an image--based on a major publisher's logo, or a box cover, or an ad, or something else--that makes fun of the game industry's lack of innovation, poor business practices, willingness to publish dreck, or whatever else you find amusing.

...how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?--EA_spouse

The Rules: Image must be no larger than 640x480, and provided as a GIF, JPEG, or PNG. You retain all rights to your work, except that you grant us the right to display the image on our site as part of the contest. We reserve the right to reject something that's particularly gross, libelous, or otherwise illegal, but otherwise, pretty much anything goes. Images will be uploaded here.

Last month, Capcom announced that it was dissolving Clover Studios, the developers of Viewtiful Joe and Okami. The announcement came a bare month after the release of Okami, a game that has received rave reviews virtually across the board, and boasts an astounding Metacritic score of 93. Game Informer, IGN, and EGM all awarded Okami the title of "Game of the Month."

Why are they dissolving Clover Studios? Because of Okami's "disappointing sales."

Last year, Majesco, a smaller publisher best known for its GameBoy Advance titles, released Psychonauts, a game created by Tim Schafer--famous for his work on the old LucasArts Adventures. Psychonauts had originally been commissioned by Microsoft, but MS dropped it during development, and Majesco picked up the game. It received rave reviews virtally across the board, and boasts a noticeably high Metacritic score of 86. Psychonauts received awards from the British Academy, IGN, EGM, and PC Gamer, as well as a Game Developers Choice Award, arguably the most prestigious award in the field.

The NOKS has received a major update and price change:

1. It's now $11.95 instead of $19.99.

2. Demo allows play for 21 days instead of 2 hours.

3. A number of bug fixes.

4. Noks's powers now affect the 'shooter' portion of the game, each giving weapon, shield, and/or time power.

Join us on Wednesday, November 1st for a chat with on the subject of games and art with Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Marc LeBlanc, and Eric Zimmerman.

Network: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #gamesandart
Time: 6PM PST, 9PM EST, 2 AM GMT

See our page on how to get on IRC.

More About the Topic:

Hideo Kojima says "If 100 people walk by and a single person is captivated by whatever that piece radiates, it's art. But videogames aren't trying to capture one person. A videogame should make sure that all 100 people that play that game should enjoy the service provided by that videogame. It's something of a service. It's not art."

At one of the earliest (C)GDCs I listened to Chris Crawford lecture about what he called "process intensity." In an article for the Journal of Computer Game Design, he later revisited the subject, and wrote:

"Process intensity is the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data. All programs use a mix of process and data. Process is reflected in algorithms equations, and branches. Data is reflected in data tables, images, sounds, and text. A process-intensive program spends a lot of time crunching numbers; a data-intensive program spends a lot of time moving bytes around."