The Indyish Games: a look backward and forward.

The music videos from the MVMC 24hr are going up all over the web, and now one by one chez nous, and it’s very fun and exciting. We need to play this game again, is all I can think. Fortunately, we have a new game coming and we’ll get to try it out as early as this week. We’re going to do a small test run of a story authoring game we made up, to see if we can write and draw a story that’s successful (subjective? yes.) by playing with on and offline houseguests who write and draw together. I have a graph coming.

We just want to play with some friends bc it’ll be fun to see what happens, and because drawing is fun and writing is fun. And we’ll only be able to see how the rules interact with each other by playing, so we may want to refine them after. And then we can plan to play for real at a future big indyish event. I’ve already described how I think the game works a bit in an earlier post. And we’ll get to hang out while making, which I find very fun and satisfying because I have a thing about multi tasking. And even if just a few people play (here or online) it’ll be the kind of thing that makes it repeatedly apparent that there are lots of tangly threads of possible stories in each picture or paragraph. I’d even posit this as a definition of great art: that it contains the potential for countless interpretations and sprouting stories. I think games and rules that play with the act of creation are very interesting- our brains respond in flickery ways to challenges, and it’s probably only with a build up of that flickery light in your brain that great stuff gets made. (scientific? no.) But anyway, though I’m excited to play Our House versus Your House, for now- I’ll just remember the sweetness that was in that moment of watching the bands perform for the people who had spent 24hrs making music videos for them, and enjoy the satisfying, perspective widening diversity of music videos that got made. mmm, goodly.