Lexcavator: A cool word-exploding arcade game

A great new arcade-like word game has just been released for desktop computers. It's called Lexcavator, a name that evokes the idea of digging for words. In this game, you tunnel down through a bottomless grid of letters by forming words Boggle-style. Then you jump your little avatar (represented by the "@" symbol) around in the various tunnels that you create, as you try to avoid being pushed up to the top of the screen by the constantly rising letter grid.

The game feels like a hybrid of Boggle and an inverted Tetris. Once you get used to using the mouse to click and drag through letters to form words and navigating with the keyboard, the interface becomes quite intuitive. There are power-ups in the form of other symbols: "!" creates a deep one-column-wide vertical shaft, ">" clears all the letters in the row that it is sitting on, "_" destroys a random set of tiles, "?" randomizes all the letters, and "*" takes out all letters in a 5-by-5 grid.

You don't necessarily need to activate the power-ups when you uncover them. I find that using the "?" power-up usually causes the resulting letters to be harder to make words out of. You also have the option of delaying usage of a power-up by guiding it down with you: for instance, standing next to the power-up and excavating under both yourself and it works nicely.

Once you finish a game, you get a report of various statistics about your performance. If you enable the "Internet" option in the Settings, the game will also report your scores to the central server and tell you how well you did compared to other players...

and what words you were the first in the world to find:

As of today, only 2% of the words on the word list had been found, according to the Lexcavator Twitter account. According to the developer's blog, the leaderboard is completely anonymous, so you don't have to worry about generating a login or a password or recovering a password when you've forgotten it. It's simple and done the right way, just like everything else about the game.

This is the kind of game that you will find yourself wanting to play repeatedly. There is also a Quest Mode which consists of a series of untimed challenges (like, find four 4-letter words, all in lines, without finding any other words).

You can get the game at lexcavator.com. It is being distributed on a pay-what-you-want model. I initially downloaded it for free, but I'm going to go back and pay for a copy to support the developer.

Indie Game: The Movie - a documentary

Last year I wrote a post partially about how great indie video games are, citing as an example the creativity of Jonathan Blow's temporal anomaly of a game, Braid.

Now I've learned that a documentary about such games has been made, and one of the primary interview subjects is Jonathan Blow himself. The documentary is called Indie Game: The Movie, and it focusses on the challenges of independent video-game-making and the passion of the creators. (Fittingly, the documentary itself is also an independent production, made by two filmmakers and funded by Kickstarers and DVD pre-orders.) The film also includes 1) Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, the artist-programmer pair behind the action-based platform game Super Meat Boy 2) and Phil Fish, whose still-to-be-released game Fez involves exploring a 3-dimensional world with a 2-dimensional character. By rotating the perspective in 90 degree increments, new faces of the world become visible, and previously uncrossable gaps in the landscape disappear. You can see it briefly in the Indie Game trailer:


Here is a bonus video illustrating Fez gameplay:


Reviews from its Sundance debut were positive. The current IMDB rating is 9.4.

In March and April, the film will be have one-night screenings in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Asheville, Seattle, Portland, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cambridge (Massachusetts), with another screening Toronto in May. All screenings will include appearances by the filmmakers who will answer questions. The film is also showing at the South By SouthWest Film Festival. See the full schedule for details. The film will later be purchasable from the documentary's official site.

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UPDATE: This film is now available for streaming from Netflix in the U.S.

PAX, the Omegathon, and novelty in video games

I love books and documentaries that examine quirky subcultures. The book Word Freak provides a fascinating look inside the world of tournament Scrabble. Murderball was a great film about the players of wheelchair rugby. My favorite quirky documentary though is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which dramatizes the competition between two players for the high score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.

I've just found an amazing article online called PAX Primer which is the perfect introduction to the quirky subculture that is the Penny Arcade Expo. It covers the origins of the Expo (in case you ever wanted to know how a web comic can spawn a convention dedicated to video games and board games), the growth of video games, and their transition from fringe to mainstream culture.

Earlier this year, I posted about PAX because Bananagrams was an event in the PAX East Omegathon. It turns out that the Omegathon organizers decided to feature Bananagrams in the west coast PAX Omegathon as well. The article says that in the convention program, Bananagrams is described as "like Scrabble, only not boring and for old people".

It later goes on to discuss a few computer games which I might opine are "like video games, only not boring and for old people". The new wave of computer games does not suck you into endless repetition.

Portal is a game where you solve puzzles by shooting two holes on different walls, ceilings, or other surfaces in your environment. These "portals" are connected (as if by a wormhole), so whatever goes in one, comes out the other, with the same momentum. I recently started playing this game and can not get enough of it.

Braid is an even stranger game in which the player gets to control the flow of time. The selling points of the game are listed on the game's web site:

• Every puzzle in Braid is unique. There is no filler.
• Braid treats your time and attention as precious.
• Braid does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.

Braid's programmer, Jonathan Blow, self-financed the game as he coded it over three years as a statement about how video games could and should be different.

Braid does not look like any other computer game. The artwork is great. It was done by the artist behind the surreal web comic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. Braid also does not sound like any other computer game. Its atmospheric music helped to win me over.

With the success of these games, even more ambitious games are in the works, on topics such as non-Euclidean geometry (Antichamber) and four-dimensional space (Miegakure).


In a world where video games have become mainstream, it makes sense for a niche to develop for games that emphasize originality. I am glad that quirky subcultures exist to sustain this kind of bold experimentation.