Look, we're Game Designers!

mjperson and I went to talk to shumashi's picture-game team today. I hadn't thought before about the oddly recursive nature of talking to a team about a game we made up in part inspired by the short description of their game. It was also interesting to hear Mike talk about it - I know all the things *I* think, but he wrote the rules while I built the infrastructure, so we have different points of view, and we have a long history of managing to divide up all the important bits of a project into stuff he thinks about and stuff I think about. Plus Mike is better at instructional lecture than I am, having spent more EPs on teaching skills, so I probably found it almost as educational as they did. I don't know how much of a lesson Octopus Wars is for their game, though, as it is very much designed for noodlyness and "people I know". Still, between meeting Warren Spector the other week and talking about game design at an actual game design lab, I have some amount of nostalgia from when games was something I did Officially instead of just something I did with a spare timeline. :)