Lotsa' Games

Darnit. I had yet another idea for an RPG to design. Time to go over the ideas I have cooking:

• Thrash 2.0: The long overdue second edition of my fighting game RPG. I really need to get my crap together on this. I've got a lot of the work finished; mainly I need to fill in the rest of the maneuvers and commence playtesting.
  
• Tokyo Heroes: My sentai/magical girl RPG. The first playtest went pretty well, and I have plenty of stuff to work on.
  
• we are flat: A trilogy of short games inspired by the "superflat" art movement, which means really weird, twisted anime/manga-inspired stuff. The first game, Moonsick, is actually coming along pretty well. It borrows a lot from The Mountain Witch, and it's weird as all get-out.
  
• Nekketsu! Battle Stars: The idea (which came together over the past few days) is to put together a general, light system for melodramatic, manga-style battles (as seen in titles like Bleach and Naruto), and present three radically different settings with freely tweaked rules. Nekketsu (熱血) means something like "hot-blooded" in Japanese, and refers to crazy, over-the-top fighting heroes.
  
• Distorted Futures: "A Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG." Like Neo or Violet or V, you can make the world a better place, but what will you sacrifice?
  
• I Hate You: "A Cartoon CSI Game For Two Good Friends." Coyote vs. Roadrunner, Tom vs. Jerry, etc., as a competitive RPG.

Also, from the world of video games, Prof. Henry Jenkins of MIT was interviewed for GameDaily.biz, and he had a lot to say about the medium's growing and changing identitiy. On the one hand, the industry is facing all kinds of idiotic criticism, but on the other hand it's caught up in its own notions about what a video game should be:

HJ: Let's be clear: the word, game, as used in the games industry, seems to mean anything you do on a computer for fun. The game industry lumps together a variety of different things, sports, games, design tools, toys, role play, stories, which we might keep separate in the real world and calls them all games. This is powerful from a marketing stand point.

Then, on the other hand, they use the word, "games" rather narrowly to repel outside competitors and block new ideas. When Brenda Laurel tried to develop a girl's game movement, the recurring response was that these were not really games. The same response has from time to time been directed against educational games, serious games, and casual games, that is, anything that doesn't fit their marketing model or that might allow people outside the core industry to expand our understanding of what their medium could do.