Over at the Arthouse Games site, there's a neat interview with Rod Humble about his experimental game The Marriage - and the first thing I spotted was Humble's interesting background, with games such as The Humans, which is almost Tail Of The Sun-esque, and predates it.

Nowadays, he's Head of The Sims Studio at EA, and is intrigued by the reactions to his distinctly arty art-game: "The amount of people who immediately understood and liked the game was larger than I had imagined, their main criticism was that they felt my explanations were unduly detailed. I stand by the decision to include the explanation however as I think it helped some folks understand my intent and I didn't think it was fair just to leave them without explanation."

He also talks about his upcoming personal experimental games, both of which sound interesting, to say the least: "The first is a game about power politics and identity, I am struggling with it. The second I started last week as I was reading some of the responses to The Marriage and the discussion of what is and isn't art. It's a game which takes as its starting point the fact that the oldest games we know are far older than the oldest music we know. So I am taking an ancient piece of music and translating its message into game rules, or at least trying to."

[Oh yeah, and Kloonigames put forward 'The Divorce', a very April 1st-themed game based on The Marriage: "The bats are of course my parents. My parents are very long and thin, so this is represented by the shape of the boxes. The ball is an unwanted child of their marriage. I was quite young when my parent’s divorced so, that is represented by the size of the ball."]