Contrasting views on the ‘game of the year’ meme.

I should start by saying that I consider myself something of an outsider when it comes to games. I’m blogging about casual games dev at a time when casual games are often, wrongly, taken to mean downloadable try/buy games. I’ve played games since the year dot really, I wrote my first game (a wrestling sim) before I was at secondary school. It was a complete failure but I do have form, guv’nor. Although, I didn’t return to game development until recently, since being in a band and playing guitar was much more fun at the time. I have always *played* games though. Hours and hours of counter-strike. Hours and hours worth of Q3A or Quake II CTF with the grappling hook on.

Anyway, I’ve been reading the Game Tunnel reviews over the last few days and I was completely disappointed by the Casual Game of the Year category. Three grouper/match three clones and a platformer? Surely there’s more to it than that? When it comes to web gaming, innovation is as rife as the cloning that seems endemic in the try/buy world. Web gaming has given us the stick, after all. Way of the Stick, Xiao Xiao and to top it all off, Stick Arena. It’s not like the try/buy world hasn’t borrowed from web gaming before, as this poster on Slashdot noticed. Web gaming, of course, is not above match-three/grouper clones, it just seems that the innovation is still around in flash and director games whereas try/buy games seem to have given up and focussed on the $20 price point until that rule is successfully broken.

As if to prove my point, there’s even an Arkanoid Game of the Year. Compare and contast this with the IGF web games finalists. For starters, there’s recognition of the whole web games market, for which the entire web games market waves back, as do I…

/me waves

As noted on a Director mailing list, IGF web games finalists… 2 Director games, 1 Flash! No Java, no nuthin’. That is remarkably good for Director, long since considered dead since the Adobe/Macromedia deal.

Congratualtions are due to Darwinia, Dofus and Dad ‘n Me, all good quality, innovative games. If you want to get a good idea of what other web games were popular this year, why not check out the year as seen by MOG:

http://www.millionsofgames.com/2005/

It’s not conclusive, fair or entirely 2005 related but those are the games that everyone on MOG told us about, time and time again. I can’t wait to see what the 2006 list starts to look like.