In an age where even the most humble product or business has to be award-winning, the gaming industry is no exception. In future posts I will present some of the awards given out every year, sometimes to the usual suspects, sometimes not. As it happens with any award, the public (game players in this case) does not always agree with the juries. The aim of the posts will be to describe how the awarding process works and what kinds of games (and game players) the awards are aimed at. To keep current about which games are actually awarded, I recommend the blog listed on the sidebar.
Archives for blogs category
From the start, the plan was to split the content of my old website into two blogs: one about Computing and my professional activities, the other about my interest in games. For the past three weeks I have been only working on the former, and delaying the creation of the latter. The event that finally triggered the birth of this blog was the announcement by a fellow games club member of his own blog. I had not discussed my plans with anyone and therefore his independently taken decision was a welcome incentive to finally getting started, because it showed that I was not the only one to feel the urge to record some of the gaming experience gained at the club.
Creating the initial pages and the sidebars was straightforward, by making use of some material from my previous site and drawing on my experience with the other blog. Finding a suitable theme (WordPress jargon for the “look and feel” of a blog) took a little longer.
Somehow I stumbled upon the very appropriately named Dream World theme. In fact, when playing a board game, you get to do things you don’t do in your daily life. For example, you can be an archeologist in Thebes, a F1 pilot in Formula Dé, a pirate in Pirate’s Cove, or lead the US or USSR through 40 years of Cold War in Twilight Struggle. This last game is actually an example of how some well designed board games draw on history, economics, or social mechanisms, and then simplify reality in order to become playable. Further examples are the stock trading in Acquire or the speculative art dealings in Modern Art. When I saw the manipulated photo of the DreamWorld theme, I immediately knew I had found the look for my blog. I interpreted the progressive loss of realistic and detailed texture from the trees on the left to the castle on the right as a metaphor for good board games: they are grounded on the real world, but they abstract it, and distill the essential of the particular experience they simulate, whether bidding at an art auction or digging for ancient artefacts.
