I like games! Do you?
To that end, POEE proposes the countergame of NONSENSE AS SALVATION. Salvation from an ugly and barbarous existence that is the result of taking order so seriously and so seriously fearing contrary orders and disorder, that GAMES are taken as more important than LIFE; rather than taking LIFE AS THE ART OF PLAYING GAMES.
The Principia Discordia, pp. 74
I like to play games a lot. Card and board games (and less often role-playing or other long-winded exercises) constitute my main pretext for socializing with other humans, both in-person and online, as I enjoy quite a few varieties of computer games as well. As I get better at programming, I drop the occasional working example of the latter category into the global gamespace.
This page is about games I have made, games I like, and other gamey things in my world. I have a separate page devoted to my current favorite card and board games.
Jump to: My game blogs and podcasts | Games and game systems I have created | My digital game identities | My game links
Podcasts about games
I produce a couple of irregularly published video podcasts involving games.
I should first mention The Gameshelf, a TV show and video podcast that I produce. Each episode features me and some friends talking about, playing, and telling you how to find obscure but interesting games. Check it out.
There is also Jmac's Arcade, a series of short monologues reflecting upon the intersections of my life and old arcade games.
Games I have made
Currents
This is my first original game invention since I got involved with the alt-gaming scene. I'm pretty proud of it. To play, you need a checkerboard, a deck of cards, and a pawn on some sort, along with these rules.
Martian Chess: the computer game
My attempt to translate Andrew Looney's Martian Chess into a networkable computer game. While open to anyone with a sane telnet client, I've ceased further development of it for now.
fall
A tiny game I wrote as an entry to an Obfuscated Perl Contest. I have since learned that it's been used in at least one classroom setting as an example of the madness of which Perl hackers are capable.
Calliope (and other IF stuff)
I have always enjoyed text adventure games, even in this age of three-dee graphics on 32-meg video cards. I even wrote one for a contest in 1999, but tend to spend far more effort in getting people turned on to this whole beautiful genre than I do getting them to play my one silly example.
I recently found that someone made a web-playable version of it. Whee!
Volity
Volity isn't a game, actually; it's an open protocol and framework for playing games over the Internet. It's also a large, multiperson project that I'm managing.
Minti Nomic
Some friends and I started a game of Nomic in early 1999, and while it's rather run out of steam for now, the Perl scripts that ran it still function, more or less, so it remains an interesting conversation piece, at least.
Jmac's game console identities
Can you believe that when I first created this page, I thought my first-generation PlayStation was hot stuff? Anyway, here's my info regarding the most recent wave of Internet-enabled game appliances I happen to use.
Wii
My Wii friend code is 5097 2869 6404 3359.
XBox 360
My Gamercard:
Nintendo DS
My DS friends codes and other writing is on its own page.
Gamey Links
Wunderland.com
I owe a lot to Looney Labs, and their amazing sprawl of a website, wunderland.com, made by a community of friends, all creative geniuses, which one can spend weeks happily exploring. My chance encounter with it one day not too long ago showed me the great potentials for fun and inpspiration that elegent, self-contained multiplayer games can reach, rescuing me from the doldrums of solitary computer games and off-and-on RPG sessions. As one of their Mad Lab Rabbits, I do what I can to evangelize the Labs' games in particular, my favorite of which is without question Icehouse, an ingeniously abstract game system that can't help but encourange creative players to try coming up with their own rulesets.
NetHack
My favorite timekiller. Help the brave little @ hack and slash its way through a dungeon of fierce and deadly alphanumerics and a brain-melting array of gameplay permutations. Runs on every operating system you can think of, except for PalmOS. (Foo.)
The Interactive Fiction Archive
I proudly host a mirror of the Interactive Fiction archive, an enormous repository of interactive fiction ("text adventure") games, interprerters, and other resources, both ancient (pre-1990) and modern. You may want to have a look at my own page about IF.
Sadly, my mirror of the archive is down because the server fell over and it's in a locked room that nobody can get into. How appropriate, hm? Anyway, you're best off visiting the main IF Archive website until then.
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