I already admitted to being a shameless fan of Blendo Games, creator of Gravity Bone and Flotilla. The newest release is called Air Forte, and it’s another brilliantly bizarre game, this time teaching multiplication tables, parts of speech, and geography.

Even if edutainment isn’t your thing, you should at least check out the demo — it’s available for PC/Mac OS X/Linux as well as the Xbox 360 in the Xbox Live Indie Games section. (And it’s only five bucks there, which made it a sight-unseen purchase for me). The graphic design is phenomenal as always, and I was a fan right from the title screen.

Air Forte takes some of the characters you run into in Flotilla and re-casts them as subjects of a kingdom whose multiples, words, and countries are being stolen. As the best pilot in the kingdom, you’ve got to take off and find the missing multiples while avoiding the mines. The story’s presented all in comic book format, set to a perfectly inappropriate surf guitar soundtrack.

As for the educational merit, I don’t have a kid present so I can’t comment one way or the other. (It was, however, an unwelcome reminder that I’ve forgotten all the multiplication tables). And I have to be a jerk and point out a couple of errors in the grammar sections — “smiling” can be a noun, and “lunch” can be a verb, for instance. But for me, the game wins on presentation alone, and I loved every second of it.

If you’re wondering about platforms, flying with the Xbox 360 controller is a lot easier than with the mouse.

I never would’ve expected that the follow-up to Flotilla would be an educational game, but that’s the consequence of dealing with an unrelentingly original game developer, I guess. At this rate, Blendo could release a game that’s nothing but quick-time events and I’d still be on board from day one.

To promote The Devil’s Playhouse, GamePro has been running a series of videos on the history of Sam & Max. Part 3 is up now, covering the period when Telltale picked up the license and started making the episodic series. Note: I am in the video, but not enough to cause drowsiness.

And episode four of the new season, Beyond the Alley of the Dolls, is going to be released next Tuesday, July 20. It answers all kinds of questions, like, “What’s with all the Sam clones at the end of episode three?” and “Who is the mysterious Mr. S that Stinky was talking to?” and “Who is the ominous Dr. Norrington?” and “How many of these things are they going to make, anyway?”

This weekend, Roger Ebert stirred up the whole “are video games art?” debate with a blog post and dozens of Twitter messages saying they won’t and will never be. I was surprised. I would’ve thought he’d want to put that whole mess behind him after the last time a few years ago, especially since he keeps feigning surprise that so many video game players and developers would take offense.

As it turns out, the post came in response to a video of a TED talk given by Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany, one that was forwarded to Ebert because it calls him out and attempts to refute his argument.

Like Ebert, I’ll say that Santiago is a good speaker who delivers an engaging presentation. Unlike Ebert, I’ve played and loved the game Flower, thatgamecompany’s most recently-released project. And unlike Ebert, I’m making an effort to understand where Santiago’s coming from instead of instantly dismissing her claims and acting as if I’ve “won.”

Still, I’d have to say that Santiago’s defense of games as art is about as unconvincing as it could possibly be. She starts with a statement that games are art but can’t hold up any great examples to compete with the great masterworks of other media — a mistake, because judging the merits of one medium in comparison to another one is entirely missing the point.

Next she uses a modified version of the “games are still young” argument, comparing them to cave paintings. That’s always seemed completely empty and without merit to me, both for the reason Ebert gives to refute it — many cave paintings have a representational quality that resonates even today — and because it’s unnecessarily defeatist. We don’t have to wait and see the great games get made; they’re already being made.

Lead by Example

Then, she gives a cursory overview of three games, including Braid and Flower and an assertion that they’re art, based on a weak and easily-dismissible definition of what “art” is. Here I do have to admit that I got a kick out of Ebert’s dismissal of Braid as having “prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.” Not because I particularly hate the game, but because it’s the perfect example of How Not to Do It. It wears its art game pretentions on its sleeve, and is so frequently trotted out as “Hey Look At How Much Art This Is” by people eager to have video games justified, that they’re afraid to acknowledge its flaws.

In particular, its biggest flaw: that wordy fortune cookie prose, which just makes it glaringly evident the game’s “meaning” isn’t delivered via its mechanics, but simply reinforced by them. Here you can read about a guy regretting past mistakes, and here you can play a plat former where you can take back moves. Unlike, say, Shadow of the Colossus or even BioShock, where the “meaning” of the game becomes evident directly through the player’s actions in the game. Here is a game which you gradually discover is about choice when confronted with the choices you actually made — or more accurately, weren’t permitted to make — over the course of the game. All that said, Ebert did Braid a disservice by dismissing it based on his own archaic definition of what a “game” is. “Taking back a move” is indeed a cop-out in chess; it’s not a cop-out when “taking back a move” is one of the game’s core rules.

But Flower is a much better example of a game as art. Santiago explains designer Jenova Chen’s motivation for the game, and the idea of the balance of nature that he was trying to convey. It’s a work that conveys meaning from a creator to an audience via the properties unique to its medium — you can debate whether it’s “good art” or “bad art” all you want, but that game fits any layman’s definition of what “art” is. If you dismiss Flower as not being art, then you’d have to dismiss entire schools of visual art as well. Ebert again gives it a cursory dismissal based on the fact that he doesn’t like it, asking questions that could be easily answered by either playing the game (it’s not that long, Roger) or even looking it up on Wikipedia, and again holding it to his definition of what a “game” is, not any definition of what “art” is.

Market Impact and Critical Acclaim

After what would’ve been a compelling example, Santiago then defends the games in terms of their financial success and critical reception. I can only assume that she figured if the defenses of them as “art” didn’t take, then any defense would do. Ebert — correctly, I have to say — lays waste to the idea that critical and financial response have anything to do with the nature of art, so the less said about all that, the better.

Who Cares?

So now, Ebert’s mentioning the hundreds of responses to his post (I think his last claim was over 2000 at the time I wrote this), many of which just call him out for being old-fashioned. He acknowledges that he stirred up a hornet’s nest, when the whole thing was supposedly in response to a reader’s e-mail message, and he’s somewhat disingenuously claiming to be bewildered by the response. (And, I’ve got to point out, he’s being kind of a dick about the whole thing, but considering how many angry video game players he’s had to listen to over the weekend if not the past few years, I’d say that he’s entitled).

The fact is, though, that none of those responses are going to make a difference. Obviously, the “you just don’t get it, man!” approach is going to fail, and the “games are art because I cried in Final Fantasy VII” tack isn’t going to fare much better. Part of that is because of Ebert’s obstinance, and part is because he doesn’t give much to work with. At least in the last go-round, he gave people something to chew on: a pretty astute (for a non-gamer) argument about authorial control and the role of the player, based on an interesting (but I think too limited in scope) definition of what a “game” is. Here, he’s just shooting down points raised in a 15-minute video and hundreds of indignant responses.

But there are a couple of interesting parts:

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

There is, obviously, a good bit of condescension there: a disingenuous cry of “what’s all the fuss over little old me?” along with “go ahead and enjoy your little games while the rest of us appreciate true art” and “I am not familiar with any sports personalities of the last two decades.”

But the basic question is key, and that’s why the argument’s valuable, and that’s why I’m making a point of it instead of joining the chorus of people throwing up their hands and saying “Not this again!” The question is: why do you care?

Why are you offended when someone like Ebert delivers a public dismissal of your hobby and/or career as not being “art?” Are you trying to change his mind? Are you looking for validation from someone else? And is there possibly something that you’re not quite getting from video games that you feel is missing?

I’m not asking in the “why bother?” sense, either: I think it’s an important question to ask. If you’re the type who is bothered by someone claiming that games aren’t art, and you don’t just dismiss the argument, or say that “games are just entertainment” or “they only need to be fun and nothing else,” then start asking the right questions and arguing the right things. Don’t just say “this is how Ebert [or whoever] is wrong,” but “this is why I care.”

Why I Care

The reason I care ultimately breaks down into a tautology: it’s important that games be recognized as art because games are art. That is: people are already using games as a medium of expression; they have been for years. I’ve seen them, I’ve played them, and I’ve been affected by them enough to try and build a career around them.

And you won’t be able to create one of those moving, expressive masterworks unless you set out to do it. Art is about communication, but it’s not about looking for someone else’s validation of what you’re doing; it’s about your own definition of what you’re doing. (Ebert attempts to dismiss this by dismissing Santiago’s definition of art in terms of intent: she says that the great works are driven by an intent to communicate meaning; he responds that a lot of awful works are driven by the same intent, which is a completely facile non-argument). If you aim to create diversion or entertainment, that’s the best you’ll achieve. If you think in terms of “product” and “users” and market-share or critical acclaim, then you’ve imposed an artificial limit for yourself.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with pure entertainment, as long as you don’t get locked in the mindset that meaningless entertainment is the best you could possibly aspire to.

Take film, for example. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that Edison’s movie of a man sneezing is “art” by any useful definition of the word. (And to stave off the “games are still young” argument: you can say the same thing about countless home videos on YouTube). But if you stopped there and took it as a given that that was all the medium was capable of, then you’d never have seen masterworks like Rear Window or White Chicks.

No, Seriously: Games are Media

And despite what I said earlier, it’s still helpful to point out “this is how Ebert [or whoever] is wrong”:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

That’s approaching something useful, not just curmudgeonly “what’s with the kids and their video games these days?” but something like a genuine definition of where Ebert’s coming from. It’s easily refuted by anyone who’s played games in the past 15 years, but it’s actually a pretty good starting point for explanation of games as media.

For convenience, take a film that’s universally accepted as “art:” Casablanca. That is clearly a representation of a story, but it hasn’t ceased to be a film. So why can’t someone say the same for a non-abstract, narrative-based game?

You could translate Casablanca into a game, giving it rules (characters can’t come back to life after they die, Sam can’t suddenly become the romantic lead), points or status (Rick’s met Ilsa, Rick’s met Lazlo, Rick’s made it to the landing strip), objectives (get Ilsa past the Nazis), and an outcome (a hill of beans). With any story-based game, “win” or “experience” isn’t an either/or proposition: you win the game by experiencing it. (Note: this would be a lousy game, please don’t make it).

And that, of course, is only one type of game. To compare it to the history of film, a purely linear narrative-based game is the equivalent of filming a stage play: there are advantages to doing it in one medium instead of another, but it’s not fully exploiting the possibilities of the medium. And there are sufficient examples of games that are exploiting the possibilities of the medium; The Sims is the most successful, both artistically and, coincidentally, financially.

I’ve read interviews with Will Wright where he says that as he was developing what later turned into The Sims, he wasn’t preoccupied with making art. (Although I’m pretty sure that several of his collaborators were interested in making art). The key, though, is that he wasn’t preoccupied with any preconceived notions of what a game is or what a game can be. There’s no reason to suspect that a simulation of computer people would be all that fun or interesting, much less that it could become a satire of suburban life and relationships. But as with any art, you know it works when you see it.

The first episode of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse is out today for PC, Mac, and the PlayStation Network for PS3. Of course, if you were my real friend you would’ve already bought it by now, but as a special bonus offer, Telltale is still allowing you to buy it.

Plus there’s crazy cool extra stuff, like special stuff for your characters in Team Fortress 2 if you buy it from Steam, thanks to Jake and Robert and the fine folks at Valve Software. (You need to buy it from Telltale to get the collector’s disc at the end of the season, though). And also a Flaming Max Head shot glass and a Max Imp T-Shirt which I didn’t know the store was selling and I totally want now. It’s a madhouse! A madhouse of savings!

The first episode in the series is called The Penal Zone, and it’s about OH MY GOD I JUST GOT THAT JOKE. I wish somebody had warned me that it sounded kind of like a dirty word when we were coming up with the ideas for the episodes. As it is I had to find out from people who write blog comments.

Anyway, The Penal Zone is the most deeply personal game I’ve worked on. As you can imagine, growing up in the South in the late 70s and 80s, I saw first-hand the effects of hyper-intelligent alien gorilla invasions, and I recognized that this is a story that needs to be told. But the media always presents a one-sided picture, to let complacent middle Americans point the finger of blame at someone and then pat themselves on the back saying “We’ve solved the space gorilla problem.” It was important to me that The Penal Zone be not just a lecture, but a forum for open discourse and, yes, healing. I believe that videogames can make a difference — I have to believe that — and this game is my own humble way of showing all other game developers what’s possible with the medium.

PROTIP: My favorite gag in the game is when you look at the antenna on top of Bosco-Tech Labs.

Blendo Games is the studio name of Brendon Chung, and he is who I want to be when I grow up. He’s been cranking out brilliantly weird experimental games for years now, and Flotilla is the most polished and complete one yet.

You can download the demo for Windows, but I’ve been waiting for the Xbox 360 version, which went live last week. It’s in the Indie Games section, and is so far beyond any of the other games there, it’s almost embarrassing; it’s kind of like finding a complete draft of Kavalier and Clay buried in a thread on a comic book message board. Microsoft has done a noble job democratizing game development and distribution, but they kind of need a better filter on their Indie Games category, maybe a “No Really These Are Good” section.

In any case, the Xbox download will cost you five bucks, and the PC version is only ten. Even if you don’t think you’d be into the game, go ahead and buy it just to support the principle.

You can watch the demo video to get an idea of what the “core” gameplay is like — it’s a series of tactical battles in 3D space. Spaceships are more vulnerable on their backs and bottoms, so there’s a good bit of focus on flanking maneuvers and balancing ship speed and seriously this is all missing the point.

The point is that the game has a level of polish in the presentation and imagination in the storytelling that makes it abundantly clear this is one guy’s unique voice. There’s an attention to detail in all of the UI and graphic design that would be in the top tier of “professional” games, and is just plain overkill for an “indie” project. Even better, the tactical combat in Flotilla is part of a whole adventure mode, in which you’ll be encountering space rhinos, stowaway toucans, and psychic dogs. Like the previous Blendo project Gravity Bone [YouTube video of the first level], it’s not just that the whole is better than the sum of its parts, it’s that the whole is a self-contained package of genius that seems to come out of nowhere.

I’m not even any good at the tactical combat, and I can never survive past the second battle. I still bought the game without a second thought and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

When I first got interested in videogames, it was via the Atari 2600, in the days when most of the games were made by one or two people and then packaged up to support the Activision or Atari brand names. When I got interested in making games, though, was via the old “album cover” games of Electronic Arts, and later the LucasArts adventure games. What those games had in common was that they acknowledged they were creative works, not just a prepackaged toy or a piece of Commercial Entertainment Product. Over the years, having “A Game By Some Dude” on the front of the box became less cool and more a case of ego-tripping on the part of Mr. Dude, but for a while it was a huge deal: a reminder that a videogame can be a medium of expression, just as much as a comic book, or novel, or painting, or film.

That’s what I’m seeing when I browse through the Blendo Games site (although Chung doesn’t feel the need to paste his name all over everything; he mostly lets the games speak for themselves). I’d like to believe that games and the tools for making them have advanced to the point where we can reach that level of artistry and creativity of the late 80s/early 90s, where you don’t need a huge team or a publisher or an established franchise to make a videogame, you just need a good idea.

I’d like to believe that, anyway. It’s more likely that Chung is just crazy talented and/or too weird to talk himself out of making a game out of a novel idea.

The joke about Final Fantasy X was that it was called Final Fantasy X because all you did was hit the X button over and over again. I’m a little over three hours into Final Fantasy XIII, and so far it seems like Square Enix has been spending the last eight years trying to find a way to dispense with even that level of meddlesome button-pressing.

Granted, I’d been warned about this. Most reviews hit the same points: it’s a lot more stripped down and linear than previous Final Fantasy games, with all the exploration jettisoned in favor of long tunnels leading up to a boss fight. But the only review I’d read that was actually negative was Chris Kohler’s on the GameLife blog. All the others I’d seen warned that the game takes fifteen hours to take off, but once it does, it has the most interesting combat system in the series to date.

I’ve played at least half of every Final Fantasy game since VII, so I figured it was inevitable I’d end up getting it. I just figured it’d be later rather than sooner, until Best Buy informed me that my store credit was about to expire and I’d best get to stimulating the economy, pronto. (Incidentally, at the store I was trying to decide between a videogame and a printer. Both were the same price. Did I miss some event that made the bottom drop out of the printer market? Or have I been so wrapped up in digital distribution that I didn’t notice that games have gotten crazy expensive?)

So I’ve just been taking it on faith that if I keep at it, the game is suddenly going to open up and reward me with a complex and interesting battle system. And so far, it’s just been testing my faith. They’ve stripped away all the stuff that makes Japanese RPGs compelling, in favor a barely interactive Japanese anime that’s every bit as over-produced and murky and vapid as the ones that made me stop watching anime after Cowboy Bebop.

I don’t mind their mixing up the formula; in fact, I’m all for it. This is of course the series that defines what Japanese RPGs are supposed to be, and if they want to try new stuff instead of just making the same game over and over again, more power to them. But it feels like they’ve jettisoned the core game in favor of all the surface presentational stuff. There’s no leveling up (yet), just a score and a star count at the end of each battle. The stars are good for… I’m not sure, exactly. The game will occasionally toss me a new weapon or piece of equipment, but there’s no real choice involved: this weapon goes with this character, and it’s better so use it now. And I’m being led through a two-hour-long series of tutorials that claim to be introducing more and more complexity, but in fact just have me pressing A more often. (I’m playing on the 360, or it’d be X).

They’ve just started to introduce some limited customization in the form of the big stat wheels from X and XII, but as in those games, it’s something that looks like interactivity but really isn’t. The characters are pretty much pre-defined, and I can only decide whether my obnoxiously twee pre-teen girl is a magic user with 400 HP or 420 HP. They’re clearly heading in the direction of more AI control, like the previous games, and let you do “paradigm shifts” to switch the whole party between attacking, defending, healing, etc. Which sounds fine at first, but results in less interesting choices: it’s as if they replaced a party of characters with just one character. No interesting experiments turning a ninja into a black mage or anything like that. Plus, it’s been almost three hours and I have yet to fight a fireball or an angry custard.

The visuals are outstanding, but that’s to be expected from these things. And worse, they’ve reached Star Wars-prequels levels of over-saturation: the opening has a big train escape sequence through a futuristic city with mechanized monsters with deadly scorpion tails and all kinds of airships and lasers and space tunnels and crumbling buildings. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was actually happening, though. The cutscenes in Final Fantasy VII were amazing for their time — no doubt they’d look horribly dated now, but the one thing I do know is that they were used effectively. When the game cut to a full-motion video of a new city or a wide vista or the appearance of some huge monster, it was a big moment. Here, it’s all thrown at you at once.

And over the years I’ve developed a lot of patience for the weak characterization in these games — in fact, it’s usually part of the charm of them — but my attachment to these characters ranges from “don’t care” to “actively dislike and want to fall down a deep crevasse.” Final Fantasy XII did a good job of combining moderately annoying characters with a story that seemed pleasantly familiar: a brash backwoods kid teams up with a rogue pilot and his quiet, inhuman sidekick to save a beautiful princess from an evil Empire. Final Fantasy XIII seems familiar, too: there’s the taciturn ex-soldier with a troubled past, the wise-cracking black guy who’s a gun expert, the perky inappropriately dressed girl… hey, wait a second! For good measure, they added a sniveling little whiny boy who needs to die soon, and the lead singer from any given Japanese boy band.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve just outgrown these things. I still haven’t finished Final Fantasy XII, and that was one I was actually enjoying quite a bit. I suppose there’s a devoted (and much younger) audience who just loves poorly-defined characters and J-pop songs and scenes where everyone speaks in half sentences, and this is the game for them. But it seems that there used to be at least a stab at balancing the anime and the actual game. And I always got the sense that there was a little bit of humility on the part of the makers of the game, acknowledging that they’re passable storytellers but great game-makers. Here, it’s gotten Metal Gear Solidified: the cutscenes aren’t nearly as interminable, but they’re given every bit as much focus. The game seems like an afterthought.

The game I’ve been working on since last summer has finally been announced for reals. It’s Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, and it’s going to be out in April for PC, Mac, and the PlayStation Network (PS3).

The first episode is called The Penal Zone and it’s full of all the high-brow intellectual humor that the title implies. We’ve made a subtle shift to the puzzle-solving in this season: there’s a little bit less emphasis on using inventory items together and more emphasis on using Max’s new psychic powers and eventually, figuring out how they work together. The idea is that instead of a lot of random objects that have one specific use that you have to figure out, there’s a smaller set of powers that you can use in multiple places and multiple ways. I’ll be interested to see how people like it.

I already know how they’ll like the other change, which is all the improvements to the visuals. The artists did an obscene amount of work on the environments, characters, and character animation. Plus we got a bunch of lighting and rendering improvements, including real-time shadows.

Plus there’s an evil space gorilla named General Skun-ka’pe, you know, for the kids.

Check out the trailer in high definition because Telltaler Shaun Finney spent a lot of time on it and it came out really good and I’m not just saying that because he could kick me in the head without breaking a sweat. And then you can pre-order the whole season because really, you know you’re going to buy it anyway so why delay the inevitable?

Lately I’ve been reading about games more than actually playing them, and it’s been easy to get discouraged by the number of discussions about interactive narrative or authorial control or “redefining the nature of ‘fun’” without seeing many concrete examples of an innovative game idea actually working.

So it’s great to see The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom turn the “experimental game” idea into something really fun and exciting. In concept, it’s similar to Cursor*10 and Time Donkey: you solve puzzles using “clones” of your character that have been unstuck in time.

But comparing this game to other games (which is going to be inevitable, unfortunately) is just shorthand for explaining how the game works; this is still a genuinely novel project. The tutorial is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the game, so you dive right in and start playing and most importantly, having fun while you’re figuring out how the game works. Presentation throughout, including the art and especially the music, are excellent. And the puzzle design is genuinely clever, forcing you to combine everything you’ve learned how to do instead of rote repetition of a concept. It’s just a fantastic idea well executed: it doesn’t sacrifice production values for “experimentation,” it doesn’t let itself get pretentious, and it doesn’t sacrifice fun for intelligence. I love it.

The game was started as a project at USC, and the creators are now calling themselves The Odd Gentlemen and have released it on Xbox Live Arcade through 2K Play. (And it’s only 10 bucks!) As much fun as I’m having with the game, I’m even more excited to see a project that went from idea to execution to publishing without anything getting lost along the way.

Even though it doesn’t sound like it, my official stance on the iPad remains “undecided.” But back when I was going on about the vast potential of the thing, I said that an obvious and interesting first step would be translating traditional games — card games and board games, to start with — to a touch interface. It’s still intriguing to me: it’d make them more “intimate” than network-based multiplayer games, and more tactile than local multiplayer games.

I’d bet that plenty of people saw the problem with that immediately, but it took a while for it to occur to me. I’m not talking about the most obvious problem of paying 500 bucks to play chess or poker; I’m assuming that the simpler traditional games will quickly give way to fancier projects, like variants on Magic: The Gathering-type games or Real-Time Strategy or tabletop roleplaying or that global war game that Bond played against the bad guy in Never Say Never Again.

The more interesting problem is that almost every card and board game I can think of requires you to have a hand that the other players can’t see.

Even games like Settlers of Catan, where most of the action takes place on a shared game board, has an element of strategy in what you hide from the other players. When Big Huge Games did their Xbox Live version of Catan, they assumed that everybody counts cards anyway (obviously they’ve never seen me trying to count cards in a game), so they made that information publicly available. But as far as I can remember, the number and type of victory cards each player has is still kept secret.

A cooperative game like Pandemic would be an obvious candidate. And from what I understand, D&D campaigns have players cooperating against a dungeon master. (I’ve been writing this blog for six years and I’ve finally used the phrase “dungeon master.” It’s been a good run). But cooperative games are a niche category even for board games.

Now, I admit that it did occur to me that players could view their private info on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and use the iPad as a central game board. And I do admit that the idea of that gives me a geek boner like you couldn’t imagine. But it still feels deeply, fundamentally, morally wrong to even suggest such a thing.

So two questions:

1. Are there any existing competitive board games that don’t require players to have a “hand” that’s kept secret from other players?
2. Using a shared device like an iPad or a big touch-sensitive video table, what would be some good ways to keep player-specific information hidden from other players?