A great big warm welcome to myself.

Please ignore the euphemism that is my title. I was just wanting to say a hey to this big, gleaming sphere of blogos (it's like calling someone a wino, but with more pretentious wit and less blurring of grammar rules. Actually, strike out that last bit) that I've just recently joined. Soon, you will realise the complete lack of ability I have in the worlds of narrative and the written word but, let's be clear about this, it should be fun. Perhaps. With some luck.

Moving on.

Recently I've been suffering from the worlds most horrendous terminal illness. Well, terminal in a creative sense of the word. I've become a sufferer of writers block. This is not as it sounds, a giant piece of cobblestone tied to my pen (I know you Minecraft addicts were thinking it) but instead the complete lack of inspiration to write. So I find myself here exploring the great beyond of my mind thanks to a sense of melancholic despair and a Justin Bieber track I found that had been slowed down 800% and sounded like someone exploring the electric impulses of my synapses.

Surprisingly, given my writers' block, I found it overgrown. The pot plants of my psyches' front veranda overflowing their bounds, the lawn unkempt and unruly with the crabgrass of my subconscious slowly winning the turf war (...cause it's lawn...get it?) against my boring self and last weeks newspapers piling up in the farthest corner where the annoying paper boy throws them seemingly on purpose to test his aim just to get to me. What was I talking about?

I found many ideas, but realised quickly and abruptly:

None of this is interesting.

You see, being a gamer, I like to talk about games. Unsurprisingly. However, people don't want to read a blog about your latest foray into the world of nerdery if it involves anything past a controller and a terrorists' head being blown into the gritty brown wall behind it somewhere in Afghanistan.

I retreat back into my boarded up house, finding more talk of miniatures, cards, indie puzzle games, final fantasy jokes. On and on, I wade through the flotsam and jetsam of a games junkie. Soon I feel despair that I'll ever find anything interesting or entertaining for the mass blogosphere until I hit something that overlaps in the great venn diagram of games and philosophy.

Ludology.

A really cool concept in dismantling games. It simply looks at gameplay, how a game is structured, made. It judges it's rules, it's complexities, it's way of levelling the playing field for everyone. The tactics.

Interestingly, you would think that a complex, academic way of dismantling and analysing games would eschew you're gamer staples, such as the Call of Duty series or even things such as Super Mario 3. The great thing is, often and knowingly, it encourages these things.

The thing about COD: Modern Warfare and it's successor was that it played well. Really well. These were games that were spit shined and spit shined until they played well, looked beautiful and encouraged people to introduce themselves. This isn't to say there aren't problems, the fact that the "noob-tube" exists is contrary to my previous argument, but no game is perfect. And the 'tube' serves a purpose. An awe-inspiringly exploitable, annoying and obvious purpose. It helps noobs.

However, using the same tools that you used to judge this AAA title, with millions of dollars poured into it's mixing pot of production, you can judge a game made in someones' little scummy meth (read: games) lab in a matter of weeks. VVVVV is an indie darling made by one man and it involves 8 bit graphics, an eerie soundtrack and only 3 action buttons. One to move your character left, one to move your character right and one to change the direction of gravity. This game plays smoothly and has a generous checkpoint section that makes it's difficulty bearable as well as making the game more user friendly. It's puzzles can be worked out in a variety of methods, with the trial and error method probably not being a great one but often used. Check it out, it's pretty cool.

Ludology can deal with any game from any background. However it falters greatly. I recently realised that this made the method unusable for me. And many others. Ludology ignores the story a game tells for it's nuts and bolts build. This means that, despite a game like Final Fantasy X with it's amazing storyline, great character design and set pieces, it becomes broken in the eyes of ludology. Because there is no "jump button" and this lowers user accessibility, because the movement is linear, because the combat isn't overly shaken up during the entire story and because the levelling system is broken in more ways than one. But this is one of the classic games of our generation! Ok...maybe only for gamers, but still. The method is broken.

It's like saying: "I found Inglorious Basterds only OK. The scenes are really long, and the action only happens very occasionally". You ignore the tension in the dialogue, the acting, the entire reason for the film! Ludology is the main form of games deconstruction, yet it ignores such a basic premise of creation. Games don't just have to made for fun. They can say something too.

...It would be good if they were fun too of course...just saying.

On second thoughts, perhaps ludology isn't really a big overlap between my interests and others. Perhaps I have been searching through my minds proverbial loo instead of my fridge and given you the meal of un-related turd instead of spicy Italian thought sausage. But I enjoyed this rant. And Damn right you better enjoy my rants to come!

Because Shady is here folks, and here to stay!

(Hey next week I might post something good, so stick around, eh?)