I helped organize Santa Cruz’s branch of the first annual Global Game Jam this weekend and also participated. In case you aren’t familiar with this, this is an event where small groups of people get together to make a game in 48 hours and it took place in 20+ countries and 50+ locations. The experience was overall a good learning experience for all involved and my team and I (Teale Fristoe and Bill Manegold) ended up creating a game I am quite happy with: A Moose’s Love.

Play it before reading. Its short.

This is another game that began with an idea and the rules and gameworld emerged. I’m still experimenting with this design strategy as it completely underemphasizes gameplay and fun. Though, this game ended up much more entertaining and coherent than my previous Relationships game.

To sum up its creation, I wanted to create something political, my team members and I were of different political persuasions though we all agreed that we were pissed about California’s proposition 8 that recently banned gay marriage. The intention was to try and make the game actually about the broader issue of people judging and trying to control others, but there is no time in 48 hours for such things!

I’m pretty sure the metaphor we were going for stacks up in all cases. I haven’t yet heard of an exploit that communicates some possibly hilarious unintended message. This is always a risk with creating rule systems as metaphor. What I am most happy with about this is that this game presents a not particularly complicated metaphor. There is hardly anything understood about communicating with rules (just a few examples) and progress is going to come through simple, allegorical games like this.