This Week's Waste of Time

It's been a few weeks, I know. I hope you haven't given up on the internet because of me. There are still free browser games just waiting to be played. To make up for my absence I offer a four-part series that explores the very way that one understands games. No instructions, no apparent goals, just trial and error, exploration, and fun.

All four games were created by Andreas Zecher at Pixelate using local game designer Adam Saltsman's programming-code-helper, Flixel. Zecher's games ofter have a meta feel to them.

One of the best examples is his Understanding Games series. Taking cues from Scott McCloud's brilliant comic-book style guide called Understanding Comics, Zecher's four-part interactive primer for the basic laws of gaming doesn't have McCloud's depth, but the idea is the same. And while I question some of Zecher's suppositions, especially regarding what is and is not a game, his 101 course is quick, smart, and fun.

If you want an examination of the gaming world without all the pedantics, try Zecher's more playable miniseries of minigames, The Black Forest, aka this week's waste of time. Stripped down to little more than boxes with eyes and only the simplest of guidelines (they at least tell you what keys can be utilized).

It's strange that Zecher would pen games in so tightly in Understanding Games only to expand and explode that definition in The Black Forest. The four games range from an invisible maze to a side-scrolling adventure with a few twists to a music-based game to a game that heavily features a cover of Dirty Dancing's "The Time of My Life." Sounds fun, I know.

Click here to play episode one. You can take it from there.

Enjoy.