Pulling off the psychic kiss: A conversation with Richard Hofmeier

For my New Statesman article on political games, and following on from my interview with Merritt Kopas, I spoke to Richard Hofmeier about Cart Life, a "retail simulation for Windows." I had heard a lot about Cart Life and it had been gazing accusingly at me from the top of my 'must play' file for months, so I plunged in as quick as I could.

As it turned out, Hofmeier (@RichardHofmeier on Twitter) was a regular reader, and as interested in hearing my thoughts about the game as I was in hearing his. As such, this interview takes a slightly different form: it's more of a conversation. I abandon the normal journalistic practice of not blabbering on about your own half-formed ideas, and proceed to blabber on about my half-formed ideas. This is the full text of our conversation.

Conference Report: GameCamp

At a lecture given to the RSA, Everything Bad Is Good For You author Steven Johnson asked: “Where do good ideas come from?” In five minutes he outlined a theory that the most fertile environment for ideas is one where they can meet, bounce off each other and joyfully breed – where half-formed hunches can combine through conversation to emerge as beautiful butterflies. That’s why the coffee houses were the intellectual centre of 18^th century London - and it's also why GameCamp is a good idea.

Notes on 'The Marriage'

'A Garden Party At Which The Husband Is Uncomfortable'

There’s plenty to say about Rod Humble’s The Marriage – a game I briefly mentioned in last week’s article – that would have suffered from being stuffed into it. This is a tangential analysis.

Consider the Unicorn

The late-night drunk has a new song in his repertoire. I heard it not too long ago, when I was still a student, returning home from a club at 2am. Three others, crossing the road ahead of me, began without warning to belt out Erasure’s camptastic sugar-bomb: ALWAYS! I WANT TO BE WITH YOU! MAKE BELIEVE WITH YOU! We all know who to blame. It’s that bastard unicorn.

How did a tiny two-button flash game end up on the streets of Brighton? Some time ago Rod Humble – EA’s Captain of Sims by day and spare-time indie meddler by night – wrote about the ancient Egyptian game of Senet, whose intricate boards and pieces have been excavated and studied but whose animating principles are lost forever. Yet any future archaeologists who dig up Robot Unicorn Attack will have the opposite problem: they’ll have the code, but they still won’t understand why anyone gave a shit. Although you can peel back its skin and sweep away the sparkles to focus on the underlying rules, trying to pin down its appeal to any mechanical facet seems fruitless.