Mike Baker's "What gets me goin'" Post

I would say the focus of what I want to design is interactive design. This is probably because I've been playing video games for my whole life and I'm pretty interested and passionate about them. Sometimes in the more normal sense of, "Man, this game totally rocks, you get to kill zombies!" However, more recently I've been much more interested in games that are trying to do something more than that. Last year, this game came out called Braid for Xbox Live Arcade. On the surface, it doesn't look like anything particularly special; sure, it has a nice art style and it plays like a classic platforming game with some puzzle solving thrown into the mix. It's the ending that I think did something really special in interactive design, particularly in video games that I've rarely seen done in a video game. Without ruining the whole thing, I'll just say that the narrative being told in the ending is actually told through the player's actions. In most games, narrative and story is not something that is truly interactive, and in fact is usually not interactive at all. You sit back and watch the story unfold. This is what really struck me about Braid, and it's why I'd recommend it to anyone in class that has an Xbox 360.

Another game on Xbox Live Arcade that I wanna mention is Castle Crashers. This game didn't really elicit the same reaction that Braid did for me, but it is a really fun game overall. Why I want to mention it is because it was made by two guys that made the game became known through Newgrounds, a website for all things Flash. This game kind of gave me hope that anyone can "make it" in this industry if they make a quality product, even if all they did was use Flash to make it. They didn't have to have any fancy computer programming that a lot of games have, and they made one of the most popular games on Xbox Live Arcade.

The last game I'll talk about is a game called Passage. It was made by one guy and is a game about the passage of life. I don't think it was really successful in it's attempt at interactive storytelling because the story was told even if the player never touched the keyboard. However, if it was played as it was intended to be played, I think it's a pretty unique game. You can download it for free here. It only takes a couple minutes to play, so give it a try.