Leonard Richardson says: "On Monday, Adam Parrish came over and we recorded a conversation about Scribblenauts, the video game that’s sweeping the nation with a large cartoon broom. We focused on 1) topics in game design, 2) silliness. I cut the long, long conversation down to 45 minutes and the result is "The Trouble With Scribbles", the latest in the irregular series of crummy.com non-podcasts. Thrill! As we:
- Pit Scribblenauts’s object interactions against Nethack’s.
- Investigate how well Scribblenauts implements kashrut.
- Improve Scribblenauts’s design, controls, and marketability with bold spinoffs like the Scribblenauts text adventure, Star Trek: Scribblenauts, and the sinister Scribblenauts-Prime.
- Propose Georges Perec-style speedruns and Scribblenauts-enabled animal sacrifices.
Plus: complaining, and pterodactyls with ropes attached to them. Includes spoilers for Scribblenauts and Nethack.
We also talked a little about Adam’s entry in the IF competition, but I cut it out because competitors are still embargoed from talking about their games."