"Evil is not the death of games design… it is its logical end point." Film writer Jonathan McCalmont suggests that game designers are ruthlessly manipulative, playing with our brain chemistry in order to make compulsive games. So evil, in fact, that he compares them with Michael Bay. Some commentators exhibit horror at the very idea, but he takes a more constructive approach - it doesn't matter as long as you, the player, are getting something out of it.
How big can interactive fiction be? IF writer Jon Ingold has written a murder mystery called A Job For Life, consisting of 200 paragraphs and 70 true/false variables, and put it through a script that wrote out each permutation of the story. From source code of 163kb, it generated 40mb of story. If it were printed out, it'd be the height of a house.
This survey of leading indie game maker studios proves they're situated in bedrooms (of course), living rooms (fair enough), legal offices (hmmm) and chicken farms (oh!).
Triple Town for Facebook, by Spry Fox, is consuming the office. It's possibly the best Facebook game we've played (and it was originally designed for Kindle, of all things). An example of evil design? It's so good that we want to pay for more moves.
