What's sandboxing?

Well, the traditional conception of gaming seems to have gone like this:

The gaming console will be a machine placed in a public location that charges about 25 cents per play. The difficulty of the software will be optimized to induce the player to continually insert quarters; that means making the game not so easy that it can be finished on a couple of quarters, but not so hard that a player will give up after a few bucks.

Gaming seems to me to have been influenced by this to an unrecognized amount. I offer a different way of approaching gaming - sandboxing.

I assume that the player already owns the console, and will be running it while simultaneously doing something else - surfing the web, watching DVDs, playing another game, etc. I am interested in games that don't require the full attention of the player, in which the player cannot lose or is very unlikely to. Sandboxing, as a name, refers to the 'sandbox' setting on RTS PC games like Rise of Nations, where one may play without an enemy, with no realizable ending. An associated worry of software coding was that a program would run endlessly, without any conclusion, until the player decides to "give up" (although no enemy exists).

Sandboxing made little sense in boardgames; imagine a game of chess where you and your friend each have only a king, and every day you play the game, the kings having discussions among themselves, while their exterior appearance is modified by the user, not for points but just for aesthetic purposes.... such a game sounds ridiculous, but in sandbox-setting computer games that's essentially what happens.

This blog will address my attempts to 'sandbox' games on a Vista PC, a cracked PSP, a Gameboy Advance Micro and a Gameboy Color - the four consoles I currently own. (Hopefully I'll get a cracked Wii soon, too.)

Few of the games I will review are intended as sandbox games, but I'll try my best.

What's cruft image capture?

It's a scrolling slideshow of various game-related images.... grabbed while I was sandboxing, actually. It will change regularly; keep watching. Plus there'll be scifi stuff, forum images.... whatever ends up in my screenshot machine.

cruftstatement.

Just want to jot down various musings on 'sandboxing,' my unconventional approach to videogame playing. That's the main reason for this blog. But I will upload various images that I have archived and will also discuss my cruftworld project as it relates to zines, music, etc.