Our Daily Dead

By way of Wired:

Tale of Tales, the Belgian indie developers currently hard at work on the very intriguing experimental game The Path, released a brief but very interesting little game today.

Called The Graveyard, it’s a ten-minute scene that they describe as “more like an explorable painting than an actual game.”

The gameplay, if you can call it that, is simple: You walk an old woman up a graveyard path to a bench in the distance. She sits. A scene takes place. When it’s over, you lead her out of the graveyard.

The value here isn’t the gameplay, it’s the carefully crafted aesthetic experience and its (successful, in my case) attempt to draw an emotional response from the player.

Get your copy here: Tale of Tales: The Graveyard

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Wired, Tale of Tales, The Graveyard

By way of the ubiquitous AP comes news that Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.

Young Gary had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

The founding of Dungeons & Dragons is considered to be the beginning of all modern role-playing games and thus, according to Wikipedia anyway, the beginning of the entire role-playing game industry.

An interesting predecessor to D & D was originated by one Jeff Perren and then expanded by Gary Gygax. Chainmail was a set of medieval minature rules with fantasy supplements. Chainmail players controlled armies rather than single characters as is done in D & D.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons, Dave Arneson, Jeff Perren, Chainmail