Tonight my beautiful, talented wife is sitting behind me in our shared office space banging out RAW files, adjusting the curves on the three photo shoots she had this holiday weekend. Her big fear going into this November was not having anything to do, and now here she sits with a glut of clients eager to get their holiday pictures taken in time for Christmas cards to go out. When she quit her corporate gig as a catalog photographer, our family took a big hit, and we wondered if we would make it through the transition without her (or I) having to pick up a night job — or put our nearly 2-year-old daughter back into daycare. But my wife persevered and beat all the goals she had set for herself. Her secret was the combination of talent, networking, and a good credit rating.

Now more than ever, people are looking for alternate career paths, additional sources of income, or second jobs. People are turning to their passions, forgoing the loose attachments of at-will employment and corporate oversight. Many more people than ever are looking to be entrepreneurs.

Luckily for gamers there are people looking to create unique experiences for us. Luckily for them, Kickstarter is giving consumers the privilege to support them.

If it wasn’t the perfect storm, it was at least a very bad storm. It all started when Chris England’s pet project, Xenonauts, got mentioned on TotalBiscuit’s popular YouTube channel. Then, just a short while later, Rock Paper Shotgun ran a preview. In less than a week Chris’ spiritual successor to the classic X-Com moved over 500 pre-orders, netting him in excess of $15,000. And it didn’t stop there, as word of mouth was helping him average another $500 per day for the next few weeks. Things were looking up for fledgeling Goldhawk Interactive.

It was then that the plasma bolt hit him square in the chest. His payment processor, PayPal, put a hold on his account.

A game shouldn’t have to be complicated to be interesting. Really, if you think about games that existed before video games, uncomplicated was the order of the day. Sudoku, Go and crossword puzzles are as simple as they get. Non-competitive games can be extremely simple and still compelling, instead of an ever increasing ramp of tension and drama, they can become a bit of a zen exercise. A calm moment of contemplation.

OUKA is a very minimalist experience, offering the simplest rules possible in a video game. You have a mouse cursor and one button. You are tasked with clicking on the flower blossom symbol to continue. That’s the only rule you get for the entire game. As the levels progress, instead of adding more symbols or other twists, the game simply plays with you. The blossom moves as you move, or doesn’t, or avoids certain areas, or has gravity, or any number of other tricks.

This simple exercise in discovering the game’s rules is a game in it’s simplest form. The game is literally a black box, and you poke and prod at it trying to work through its inner mechanics. There are very few words as a result. Even the hint system is mostly wordless. Instead of a long sentence or paragraph explaining things, or even a tutorial video, when you click the “Hint” button the game simply lays part of the level’s inner workings bare. It’s a testament to the simplicity of the game that this works so well.

Programming note: We need more time to properly handle To The Moon, but will talk about that game next.

Chicago's games community was a pretty big deal for a while. From Midway to PC Gamer, we had a darned fine run, up until the cultural abomination of the late '90s (no matter what Sean thinks about Mambo No. 5 or the Thong Song). But times got hard, and it seemed like all the talent moved to Seattle, Boston or the Bay. Midway went bankrupt. EA Chicago closed up shop. The shining star of Chicago games seemed to be (wait for it ...) Golden Tee. Now, after years of decline, the second city seems once more to be rising from the ashes—or at least that's the idea.

While cities may burn in the course of just one night, they aren't rebuilt in a day. Networks of gamers and developers are forming. Universities are starting to pay more attention to games as craft, business and art. Mortal Kombat lives again, and Sands himself championed F.E.A.R. 3 (by Day 1, which has offices in Maryland and Chicago).

One promising piece of the rebuilding effort is the local IGDA chapter, which relaunched earlier this year and has been incredibly active, hosting panel discussions, training, and, now, a game jam.

Much of what Gamers With Jobs has become over the years is a site where people with divergent interests can go and prattle on with like-minded individuals. Want to talk RPGs of every international flavor and format? What about hard-core flight sims? Fancy a little interactive fiction? We’ve got friends here for you to make, and there are conversations to be had. But it’s not often that the game asks us to talk to it. Nous wants feedback on its performance, input from the player that goes beyond the x and y axis. And at the end of the day Nous is not here to make friends.

The first thing that the program says to you is that “This program is called Nous. I am its voice and I don’t know what I’m for.” Is the program not sure what its intended function is, or is it not sure why it has been given a voice? In any other game this could be chalked up to poor localization, but here the ambiguity is as thick as it is intentional. As the pronouns and articles are becoming hard to manage, you are becoming irritated by Nous, and the game has yet to even ask you to play it. Until finally it does. “Give me input,” and you have to jam at a key to move on.

Your first act of aggression is to give Nous what it wants, and it will pull you further along that path before it is done with you.

Designing interactive fiction has always inhabited that shade of grey between the arts of writing and game design. In interactive fiction, the words you choose as a writer can have gameplay consequences.

PataNoir takes this dynamic to its extreme. PataNoir is surrealist noir interactive fiction. If you see a set of rusty wheels described as “the color of coagulated blood,” you can then say “take blood.” In your inventory you will then find a “figurative piece of coagulated blood.” Does it sound confusing yet? It will.

I literally could not solve the first puzzle without consulting the game’s walkthrough, which involved taking the marble from the butler whose “face looked like it was carved out of marble,” then giving him a warm ember from a figurative campfire to give his eyes a friendly glow. Then, his disposition altered via the text, he would finally let you proceed.

Suffice to say I found this game very confusing, worthwhile as an experiment but not very fun to play. It stands as a monument to the difficulty in bringing some of the subtler aspects of story and character into a game, even with interactive fiction.

Join us next week as Charlie “The Wanderer” Hall screens Nous from the students at Digipen. Stay tuned to our Twitter feed for details on when and where.

A short while back, a link was posted on an academic games listhost to a title developed by a French academic who used to work for Ubisoft. Here’s how I parsed that: Expect slightly contorted language, obvious metaphors, taboos, and a fairly clear message from what should be a reasonably well constructed, if short, game.

I wasn’t wrong, but I certainly didn’t grasp all of what I was walking us into. For example, I wish I had known to post this:

Trigger warning: This game involves meeting a man who admits to photographing himself sexually abusing female children. Although the abuse itself is not depicted, the scene of the crimes is shown.

I think that we were mostly too stunned to talk very seriously about the game once we’d experienced it. Here’s a short synopsis of the game on a couple levels, which I’ll follow with some thoughts and questions.

Our first Fringe Buster Critical Screening last night was a complete success, thanks to everybody who came out to discuss A Closed World! The discussion was great, and I can’t wait to do it again next week.

A Closed World is a game from the MIT GAMBIT lab, which is a group trying to explore new directions for the development of video games. Here, they’ve tried to tackle a subject as tricky as homosexuality through the lens of a JRPG-style game.

You begin as a young kid in a JRPG-style fantasy setting and you are told “There are demons in the woods, you must face them … or wander the woods forever.” You are then free to explore the woods, finding artifacts along the way to fight your demons.

The fights themselves are actually arguments with demons that represent the judgement of others about your character’s sexual orientation. You can use Logic, Ethics or Passion to fight back and you either have to wear them down or walk away. You can always take a deep breath and regain your composure, which is what stands in for health in this battle. Otherwise it’s a standard, but very simplified, JRPG battle system.

You can see our playthrough last night captured below. Sorry for the audio issues (you can barely hear my mic). It’s my first time broadcasting this way — I’ll try to get the issues worked out for next time.

First, some housekeeping. As you can already tell, we've moved Fringe Busters to Tuesday in the schedule. This allows people more time to play it during the week and discuss, but it also helps us roll out our new format.

Fringe Busters will now have a live viewing of the game in question, where we can all get together and discuss it on Ventrillo. We setup a specific day and time for a given game and then we all can get together and talk about it live every week! The article gets posted afterwards. Look for next week's viewing at the end of this article. Now we resume our normally scheduled programming.

The “tycoon” strategy subgenre has always been rife with tongue-in-cheek humor. After all, the people in those games are reduced to nothing but consumers, and consumerism has always been a healthy target for irony. Ironic commentary on consumerism is almost as abundant as ironic commentary about religion.

Super Cult Tycoon 2 combines both into a hilarious mishmash of satire and strategy gaming. You play as a cult leader trying to build your cult by capturing acolytes in your windowless “Enlightenment Van” and taking them back to your barn. You then have them work in sweatshops generating money, or in Kool-Aid factories generating more Kool-Aid for their fellow acolytes.

The entire time, the FBI is investigating the existence of your cult, which you see as a progress bar along the top of the screen. When the progress bar becomes full, the FBI alert level is raised and it goes from quiet rumblings from FBI agents to black helicopters sent out straight to your compound. When the FBI agents make it to your headquarters/barn, the game is over. You can bribe them away with PR agencies or kill them outright with a “Robert,” which looks like a magical/Tesla sphere that zaps people.

The irony is thick in this one. When you get an Enlightenment Van full of fresh recruits, your daughter warns you, “Don’t let the oppressors of our religious freedom stop your Enlightenment Van!” The contrast between talk of religious freedom and gaining new acolytes by abducting them in your Enlightenment Van are just one of the ways the game presents irony. It’s a rare thing for a comedy game to provide irony in such abundance. Though it’s clearly a rough and incomplete alpha, it’s a clear example of how strategy games can be both funny and interesting.

Check out next week's game after the break!

The IT guys in my office are named Randy and Andy. They’re friendly and conversational, as IT guys go. But when they’re moving around the building, passing between workstations and laying hands on problem devices, they have a set of blinders on that put Secretariat to shame. They are focused like a laser on the problem at hand, and their capacity to actively ignore whatever new problem you throw at them as they run by is legendary. Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor enraged DBA will keep them from their appointed rounds. And they are damned good at their rounds.

I thought of Randy and Andy often as I played through Zombie Tech Support, the final product of the DePaul University Game Dev Program’s class of 2011 to be covered here on GWJ. I imagined inhabiting their bodies, rushing past the teaming hordes of complaining coworkers to close out a trouble ticket and move triumphantly to the next. I also imagined what it would be like to leap on their back, gnaw deeply into their gray matter, and compel them by physical force to come look at this weird error I’m getting that I can’t quite describe properly using our ticketing system. But I digress.