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January 28, 2003
Props for Snood







Have you ever played the game Snood? Well, don't start now, friend -- I lost maybe three solid weeks of work in early 2001 when I discovered this free game. It's basically a riff on the bubble-popping game Bust-A-Move, with slightly more sinister strategy. I think I've played Snood more obsessively than just about any other game on the planet, except for maybe Blix, another free online puzzle game.

And that's what's so interesting here: Online puzzle games have quietly become the most popular video games on the planet. Sure, all you'll read about in the newspaper are massive role-playing games like The Sims, or tactical first-person-shooters like Counterstrike. But according to a study by Jupiter Media Metrix, Snood is the ninth-most popular game in the world, and actually outstrips Counterstrike in popularity.

Yet you almost never read or hear about Snood. Why? In a very cool essay on his new game blog, game-designer Greg Costikyan makes an excellent point:

As far as hardcore gamers are concerned, Snood almost doesn't exist either. That's not to say that hardcore gamers don't play Snood, or Bejeweled, or other such games. They do, and they play Free Cell and Minesweeper, too. Everyone does. They just don't talk about it. They play these games differently; they're little time-wasting diversions, filling ten minutes before the next meeting, or occupying you when you're too burned out to go slay gnolls in Norrath tonight. When you meet your gamer buddies and they ask what you've been playing, you don't say "this cool game called Solitaire," even if you've spent more time on it in the last week than you have on your last major conventional game purchase. Nor do you even really place Solitaire in the same category as Halo, say.

Gamers tend to talk about games that are part of the canon, a canon largely established by the business end of things, games that come from conventional development teams. Age of Mythology is part of their culture; Snood is not. Snood is just a game, it's not a game. In fact, for gamers, games like Snood are "just a game" in the same way that, for the prevailing culture, all games are "just games".

From my perspective, that's a shame. Snood is a fine game. I've lost very nearly as much time to it as I have to Civilization or NetHack or Diplomacy, and from me, that's high praise indeed. It's a very clever little design. And "little" is not, at least in my vocabulary, a word of denigration: It is far harder to design a good simple game than a good complicated one. It's very hard to make a tightly-constrained game interesting; if I can layer a variety of systems, I can produce a widely variant gamespace, and interesting emergent behaviors almost spontaneously arise. Getting something really compelling out of something as simple as Snood is hard.

Posted by Clive Thompson at January 28, 2003 11:04 AM

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You should also check out

www.logicmazes.com

and

www.clickmazes.com

for an amazing selection of clever little diversions.

Posted by: Franco at January 28, 2003 1:56 PM

Those are extremely cool, sir! Thanks!

Posted by: Clive at January 28, 2003 2:11 PM

Costykian came from the wargames and pen-paper RPG world. Like Sandy Peterson, the genius designer of Doom and Age of Empires, he has helped expand the boundaries of computerized gaming w.o. being much of a technological elflord. Some great discussion about better engaging players in the role-playing experience has been carried out on Ron Edwards' site The Forge (http://www.indie-rpgs.com). It is devoted to pen and paper RPGs, but the forums "RPG Theory" and "Actual Play" could be a good resource for anyone thinking about/working with computer RPGs. Edwards' own theories about gaming (the modes of gamism, simulationism, narrativism;director,actor,author stances) are remarkably well thought out and persuasive.

Viva the fraternal comradeship of RPG and computer nerds!

Posted by: ErikW at January 29, 2003 9:31 AM

That Forge site kicks ass.

Posted by: Clive at January 29, 2003 12:19 PM

Think of all the games that permit users to submit skins or textures or play arenas for consideration. Players are moving out of simple actor roles into directors/programmers. Isn't that the appleal of the wired world? Take a hold of that tech and reverse engineer it to express your own twisted imagination.

Posted by: ErikW at January 29, 2003 1:46 PM

Full on! Indeed, the most popular first-person-shooter is a mod -- Counterstrike, a mod of Half-Life created by a kid in British Columbia in his bedroom. It became so popular the company bought the rights to it and issued it as a boxed game sold in the stores.

Posted by: Clive at January 29, 2003 5:39 PM

I LOVE SNOOD!!! iz 1 of mi favorite gamez 2 play! YYEEYY!!!* run around room like crazed idiot* :)

Posted by: Hope at March 14, 2003 10:36 AM

my name is kristina, and i'm addicted to snood. damn you. i love the stupid game and now can think of nothing else. bye bye.
*snood rules*

Posted by: kristina at May 6, 2003 3:30 PM

kristina, that stupid whore introduced me to snood. ever since then that game has been my life. yeah. i'm finally facing the fact that i'm addicted to snood. "tear, sniffle sniffle". must go play snood now. good snooding to all of my fellow snooders.
-ashlay :-)

Posted by: ashlay at May 6, 2003 3:35 PM

Good luck kicking the habit!

Posted by: Clive at May 6, 2003 3:38 PM

snood sucks dick

Posted by: anthony at August 19, 2003 5:44 PM

Those are extremely cool, sir! Thanks!

Posted by: portable at January 8, 2004 8:14 AM

Where can I find more information about this ?

Posted by: Swinging Couples at January 11, 2004 11:28 AM

Nice site. thx.

Posted by: Online Casino at January 16, 2004 2:46 AM

Why can i not play snood on the internet

Posted by: Anonymous at January 17, 2004 8:54 PM

Why can i not play snood on the internet

Posted by: Anonymous at January 17, 2004 8:54 PM

Why can i not play snood on the internet

Posted by: Anonymous at January 17, 2004 8:54 PM

Why can i not play snood on the internet

Posted by: Anonymous at January 17, 2004 8:54 PM

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

Posted by: Paschall at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?

Posted by: Abraham at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

Posted by: Goughe at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.

Posted by: Anthony at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

Posted by: Sampson at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

Let's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.

Posted by: Salamon at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

Posted by: Ambrose at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

When compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.

Posted by: Beatrice at January 20, 2004 12:16 PM

For this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.

Posted by: Helen at January 20, 2004 12:17 PM

Note the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.

Posted by: Judith at January 20, 2004 12:17 PM

Posted by: MilfHunter at January 21, 2004 9:43 AM


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