On Mahjong As Metaphor
So, you may or may not have spotted that LA developer Legacy Interactive has launched a new casual games site, "...including the most popular games from all the major developers and publishers. In addition, Legacy is selling its own downloadable games, including the inaugural episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, as well as the perennial family favorites, Zoo Vet and The Apprentice."
[This is probably a good point to mention that Legacy once made us print a correction in Game Developer magazine, which was fair in that the columnist writing the story for us called the ER game in question by its pre-production name - but hilariously _something_ in that we had to put that the game's real name was not just ER, but ER: The Game Based On The Hit TV Series. Well, we're GameSetWatch: The Blog Based On The Hit RSS Feed, so there.]
Anyhow, after this lengthy digression, we note that Legacy has set up a casual games blog called 'Games For Grownups', which has a couple of posts notable for being written by real casual game aficianados. We particularly like the one called 'Mahjong As Metaphor', and written by 'Princess Fly', who 'works third shift at the Harley Davidson Vehicle Operations Plant in Pennsylvania as an inspector'.
She (and we're presuming there's no JT LeRoy-ing going on here) comments of playing casual Mahjong PC games: "I love clearing the screen. It makes me feel the same way I do when my list has check marks next to every item. Another way I can relate to this game is peeling back the many layers of my person. I feel the older I get the more I learn about my inner self. Each set of tiles that leaves the screen is another mystery solved or another task completed." Y'know, this is kinda cool.









Comments
This game is not Mahjong.
Mah-Jongg is a multiplayer Chinese game, played with tiles but a lot like rummy.
The game in which those same tiles are stacked on top of each other and the player must remove according to certain rules is more accurately named Shanghai, after the original version, an old computer game created by Activision.
(Hey, I'm feeling pedantic today, so sue me.)
(Actually, come to think of it, no, don't sue me.)
Posted by: John H. | June 24, 2006 1:48 PM