Kyle Gabler, founder of the Experimental Gameplay Project and indie game studio 2D Boy, recently posted a few stats from his side project, Human Brain Cloud. The online "game" shows you a word or phrase and all you have to do is type in the first thing that comes to mind. The answers players give are amassed into a huge network of connected blobs viewable from the website. Nearly 800,000 associations have been submitted so far, connecting over 100,000 unique words and phrases.

What's the most commonly submitted word? "Sex", of course. The second most common is "me", while the third is "money". Good to know the collective consciousness of the human race has its priorities straight. Human Brain Cloud lets you sit and submit as many associations as you want, and we spent more time than we'd like to admit adding our two cents to the project.

[Via Independent Gaming]

Three days, 62 programmers, and we can assume at least three dozen cases of Jolt Cola. The second Toronto Indie Game Development Jam (T.O. Jam ... get it?!) has come and gone, leaving in its wake nearly two dozen games created by programmers from across the continent. T.O. Jam is aimed at stirring creativity and helping game developers get the most out of their coding time. It isn't a competition, it isn't a seminar, it's just a bunch of geeks writing code for three days.

Only seven of the 20 games have been released, but already a few gems have surfaced. Especially worth checking out is Xiq, a clever combination of Qix and Vectrex.

DigiPen Institute of Technology has unveiled most of the student games created for the 2007 academic year. Nearly two dozen projects will available by the end of the month covering a wide range of styles -- from space shooters, to puzzlers and the popular "riding a motorcycle in medieval times" genre.

Unfortunately the most interesting games are still unavailable, but with just a few days left in the month, the wait will be short:

• Bossinabox - a fast-paced arcade-style shooter based on the idea that boss fights are awesome. Your goal is to annihilate the boss as he splits into an army of minibosses.
• Empyreal Nocturne - a third-person aerial action game in which you combat enormous flying monsters by commanding a legion of birds.
• Gigoon - a 3D, third-person action game in which the player takes control of a giant monster rampaging through the tropical city of Rio De Janeiro
• PHLOP - a 3D physics-based puzzle game that asks the player to manipulate simple objects to create complex device in order to complete the puzzle.
• RydenStryke - a third person action game set in medieval times where the player gets to control a character from the future on a motorcycle.

A well-respected school with game developers, DigiPen's student projects have turned more than a few heads over the years. The team behind Narbacular Drop was snatched up by Valve, and the group behind the block-tossing Toblo have gained a lot of attention for their project.

Being a talented programmer and an accomplished artist can be two separate skills. Just because you can string lines of code together doesn't mean you can make pretty pictures people want to look at while playing your game. Enter Danc of Lost Garden and his new design challenge that gives you everything you need to make a game -- except the programming muscle.

Danc provides the graphics, including character sprites, items, and backgrounds. He also has a gameplay outline that is constantly being refined. The game, SpaceCute, should be a single player golf title with a strong focus on physics. Because programmers don't have to be concerned with graphics or basic gameplay mechanics, they're free to experiment and make the game as crazy as their imaginations can conjure.

The challenge is well underway (a few prototypes have already been released), but if you've got the skills and the game idea sparks your interest, it's never too late to jump in.

[Via Independent Gaming]

Rod Humble's art-meets-game title The Marriage is only a few weeks old, but the critical response from both gaming and non-gaming communities has been enormous. Arthouse Games caught up with Rod to dissect his thoughts on the reception of his "game". The interview touched on future projects and also brought up the question we all wanted to hear: What does Rod's wife think of The Marriage?

Including an explanation of the game's meaning has been one of the most criticized aspects of The Marriage. Art doesn't come with an instruction manual, games do, and Rod specifically labeled The Marriage as the former. He stands by his decision, however, and is proud to have seen the game affect such a wide audience. Relationship websites even featured his work, fueling the fire that The Marriage is more than just a game.

While you're in the matrimonial mood, check out Kloonigames' April Fools parody of The Marriage aptly titled The Divorce.

[Via Arthouse Games]

Experimental gaming these days is all about playing with reality. From virtual reality and alternate reality to augmented reality, more and more people are trying to merge video games and real life in interesting ways. Sebastien Schmieg's art project/game Roy Block adds another term to this growing list: mixed reality.

Roy Block uses real life, handheld wooden building blocks as the platforms for an on-screen avatar. A hidden camera detects the blocks as they're pressed against the tracing paper projection screen, translating their position and alignment to in-game data.

The "gameplay" in the project is pretty basic -- just guide the periodically jumping Roy from one end of the screen to the other while avoiding floating enemies -- but Schmieg sees the potential for more complex play by assigning different functions to each side of the blocks. Schmieg also has an idea for a version "as big as a wall ... with blocks so big that you need both hands to hold one." Would that be mixed reality exergaming? More buzzwords, stat!

Continue reading for video of the project in action.

Rod Humble, former Sony Online Entertainment employee currently working for EA, has just released an experimental artgame called The Marriage. There's no sound, no music, and the graphics could have been drawn in MS Paint in less than two minutes. But all of that doesn't matter. What really counts is you, the player, and how you interpret the relationships within the game.

It may sound pretentious (Rod is the first one to admit it), but it works extremely well. The best way to understand the game is to download it (Windows only) and start playing. You'll be confused at first, possibly even bored, and some may experience extreme fits of rage. But keep experimenting and try to pry into the game's mechanics. After you get a feel for it, go back to Rod's website and read his explanation. Everything will become clear and you'll understand why The Marriage grabbed your attention in the first place.

Like any good movie or book, half the fun is discussing it with your friends afterwards. After we played it, The Marriage spawned a number of interesting conversations about interactivity, games, art, and even one or two discussions about corn on the cob.

At yesterday's Experimental Game Design lecture, Alex Butterfield discussed his latest project, the mind-bending PSP title Crush, billed as a "revolution twist on the puzzle platform."

Butterfield's presentation focus on the challenges of making a game that seemingly transitions from 2D to 3D without effort. Crush is designed so that your character, who is under hypnosis to cure insomnia and forced to find a way through 40 dream sequence levels, can only "crush" (transform 3-dimensional space into 2-dimensional platformer) horizontally and top-down.

Of the challenges discussed, Butterfield talked about the shortcut challenge, whereas the clever player would be able to use the crushing ability to move from the beginning of the level to the end without effort. Thus, the team devised three different blocks whose behavior differed when crushed: ghost block (insubstantial), solid blocks (impassible) and hollow blocks hollow block (somewhere in between).

Other issues include disorientation, which Butterfield tried to fix by way of camera work and the placement of prominent landmarks to help the player. There were two design flaws that the dev team worked to solve. The creation of cut-zones let the developers section off part of the level so that one does not accidentally crush themselves next to a horrid enemy without prior knowledge. A safety feature was also implemented so that a crush process does not cause the character to fall helplessly to their doom; "an explanation as to why you failed the puzzle" will be shown instead. Many of these problems were also solved, of course, through countless QA and debugging.

Following the talk of problems and problem solving, Butterfield moved into the realm of conjecture, philosophy and other higher-order thought. What if you were allowed to crush at any angle? What if you could crush outward into four dimensions (with time being the 4th candidate); i.e. a block could become a bridge, a cockroach would crush into a centipede, etc. How about multiplayer? Butterfield suggested separate realities for each character, whereby only you control the crushing in your reality and only your movement would be reported to the other player's screens.

There's no clean-cut solution, but some of these problems give us an idea of the far future of platform puzzlers. Crush is looking good and the game's twist well-executed. The game is slated for release later this year on the PSP.

Walking the fine line between simple and just plain boring gameplay is a delicate issue, especially with independent game makers. How do you make a game appealing without stripping it of the elements that keep players coming back for more? GameCareerGuide's postmortem with the Toblo design answers just those questions, discussing the high and low points in the development process.

"Light-hearted" and "easy to play" were two key phrases in the design of Toblo, a simple capture the flag game created by a group of DigiPen students. Played in a world of colored blocks, your only goal is to capture the other team's flag. Your weapons are the very blocks that surround you, simply walk up to anything and tear it down to load up on ammo, then dash into the enemy's fort and let 'em fly. Although Toblo isn't a full-fledged game, it's proof that a concept doesn't need to be elaborate to be interesting.

The MMORPG Project Entropia is known for its economic experiments, with pieces of virtual land being bought for high real-world prices. This latest news breaks the barrier between real and virtual money even further, however; a new cash card will let owners withdraw from their ingame balances using real ATMs.

Some MMOs entirely shun the idea of converting money earned online to real money, but Project Entropia is taking this to the other extreme. The game's economy is built around real-money transfer, so a move like this simply adds a logical ending to the cashflow pipeline, with developer MindArk sitting in the middle profiting from the whole process.

[Thanks, pandlcg]