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....So, correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to support the notion that we could rid ourselves of the uncanny valley if we only budgeted more for, and employed better and more sophisticated motion capture software in our 3d animations?

That's looking at it the wrong way round. The real consequence is that we should simply revert to more "cartoony" characters in our animations. We run mocap at its limits, and at the moment the level of life-like detail on our models is too high relative to motion.

Have you ever played Façade? The 3D models were pretty simplistic, but the simple combination of eye, eyebrow and mouth movements was more expressive than modern texture-mapped, million-photo mocap faces.

HAL.

The authors of the interactive drama Facade collaborated with some augmented-reality people to build an AR version of the game, and found that although it did make people feel more "present" in an immersive virtual world, they actually engaged less with the game as a result, which went against the assumption in the AR field that more-immersive = more-good.

You can have something which is completely utilitarian, which is not a game. These programs exist: Iraqi culture simulations, reflex training programs, etc. You can also have something which has a sense of whimsy and fun. This is a game, and some of them have the potential to make you think or to awe you with their beauty.

Hey, or you can not rudely condescend to everyone else and inflict your lack of imagination and vision on everyone else.

How about this: You can have something that tells an engaging and meaningful story in a branching, linear, or emergent interactive environment. You can have something that something that makes a satirical or philosophical statement through its mechanics. You can have a game that elegantly tells a science-fiction story, simply and unpretentiously.

I don't know what the author is bitching about. He wants games without the fun, it would seem; games which take themselves as seriously as he does. Those just aren't games. He thinks games are a medium on the level of television. This is wrong. The computer is the medium. Games are merely a flavor of program, much as game-shows are flavor of television. Do you expect your game-shows to "progress intellectually" as you age?

So games are a genre (I think that would be incorrect? Are you saying the medium is inherently inflexible and vapid? Or are you saying that fun precludes maturity? Just what are you saying? Why are you so rabidly attacking a search beyond the status quo?

Fucking games journalists. Enough pretentious, bullshit opinion pieces. Get back to your fucking jobs.

And what thought out rhetoric! Truly you've won me over with your emphasis and shocking command of ideas. You know, like telling games journalists to get back to their jobs and... criticize and evaluate games? Perhaps you meant to imply that the jobs of games journalists are to parrot praise for every standard barely deviating example of the genre shoveled out by obliging companies.

You can't make the major focus of a game you play for 20-40 hours a 'lesson' about how bad global warming is.

Video Games are more like SPORTS than they are like books/movies/etc

"Interactive Fiction" implies that you become, to some degree, the author of the fiction.

Chris Crawford on his site defines interaction as a conversation - each party in the conversation rotates through three stages: listening to another, processing the information and formulating a reply, and then conveying that reply back.

Currently, computer games are appalling at listening to the player, and pretty mediocre at forumlating a reply. "Facade" (http://www.interactivestory.net/) is an excellent example of how that is improving, and it's also a subject I'm reasearching and investigating myself.

The goal of interactive fiction is effectively turn story-writing into a conversation, with the tools providing some of the information (world, background, etc.) and the "player" providing events and emotions. At the end you have a static piece of fiction, a story. It is the process of generating the fiction that becomes interactive. Naturally, however, the "player" experiences the story as it is constructed, so the reading and creating happen similtaneously, which makes it less obvious the end result is still a "static" piece of fiction.

Our brains do it naturally in many ways. I designed a simple combat system suitable for MUDs and their ilk, using text-based descriptions entirely, rather than numbers, and strategic mechanic that rewarded careful choice. My beta-testers regularly sent me messages with stories of battles they'd had:

"The beserker lunged at me, and I parried, but the blow left me greatly unbalanced. He attacked again but I rolled out of the way. I risked pausing to catch my breath, and luckily he expected an attack and wasted the chance blocking. I feinted, but he knocked my sword aside so powerfully I staggered back. He took the chance to slash at me but I managed to dodge out of the way. I attacked, and he was so tired by this point he fumbled his parry, and I managed to run him through."

From a simple web-page based combat game their brains constructed this whole battle. My software provided the setting and antagonist, they provided the character and emotions.

It's just a case of making sure your game encourages that part of the brain, rather than insisting on talking to the rational, logical, numerical sections.

Gravity Head, and the rest of the Experimental Gameplay Project
Dada: Stagnation in Blue
Cloud
Katamari Damacy
Facade
Flow
Orisinal

It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.

Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade, Dada, stagnation in blue, and most everything this guy does. Heck, subspace is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.

'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*

*Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.

That's fairly amusing. I was half-tempted to try for something along the lines of Facade, except with a fantasy twist. That's like watching a couple go through an emotional train wreck and yet no actual punches are thrown.

Amazingly enough, the game's authors disagree with you, it is in fact Façade (yes, including the italics and the capital F). It always pays to back up your anti-pedantry pedantry with RTFA.

I'm no genius, obviously, so I guess I'd like to know what kind of "programming hassle" makes them require installation to the C: drive. (From the help section of their web site.)

I mean, don't you just need to set a registry key (or something) with the base installation directory? What are they doing that needs hardcoded full directory paths? I'd like to try the game, but apparently I'm not going to because I don't use C: for applications, just the OS. (And it doesn't have 1GB free anyway.)

Sorry to disappoint, but Samir Gupta is a troll from way back. Check his post history. He has claimed, at various times, to be high up in both Nintendo and Sega. He claims to have a PhD to give an air of credibility to his posts. If you want to look at some real cutting edge research into interactive stories, check out InteractiveStory.net. The website isn't that impressive but seeing it in action is amazing. I hope they remember to release it as a free download like they claim they will.