Gamasutra Member Blogs: From Playing By The Rules To Not Playing By Them

In highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our weblog writers IGF submission lessons, the rules of rules, and the inevitability of prototyping. Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. Our favorite blog post of the week will earn its author a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. (All magazine recipients outside of the United States or Canada will receive lifetime electronic subscriptions.) We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. Here are the top member blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Member Blogs - Playing By The Rules (Jake May) Jake May is a hard-bitten, hard-nosed, hard-boiled game designer who plays by his own rules. With a heart of gold. On another note, have you ever fully considered the crucial role of the meta-game in game design? Jake May wrote an article about that. For his effort, he will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine. - True Non-Linearity In Games (Dolgion Chuluunbaatar) Dude... Have you ever thought about how real life is totally, like, the most non-linear RPG of all? And how, like, a truly non-linear game requires a systematic world that works by itself, feeds from itself, the player only being a part of it, allowing the player to express him or herself in this confined environment? Dig it, man. - Spoof of Concept, or Why Prototyping is Fraught With Peril (Jacek Wesolowski) Prototyping is so integral to game development that it's happening pretty much all the time. In fact, you're probably prototyping right now. The prototype is iterating from inside the house. - Lessons learned while submitting to IGF (part II) (Daniel Silber) From the creator of "Lessons learned while submitting to IGF" comes the thrilling, darker sequel: "Lessons learned while submitting to IGF (part II)." Can our hero, independent video game developer Daniel Silber, weather a failure to place in the world-famous Independent Games Festival, armed with judges' feedback and lessons learned the hard way? Watch Silber turn tragedy into triumph this summer in a theater near you right now on a blog. - I Have Been On a Podcast: Building On Online "Presence" (Kimberly Unger) Okay, so that's not actually the title of this blog post. I just couldn't bring myself to reproduce it accurately.