During a recent episode of River Cottage Autumn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall gave a fleeting reference to lovage – a plant I have been gleefully looking for excuses to talk about since I first heard of it a year or two ago. To cut a long story short, I soon found myself reading Wikipedia’s list of companion plants. I love it when naturally-evolving systems of interaction have controllable, practical functions – another fun example is the use of guard llamas – because it creates wonderful opportunities to PLAY GOD WITH A TINY ECOSYSTEM.

The objective of Full Spectrum Window Box is simply to grow some nice stuff in your window box. The important gameplay schtick would be that all the different plants, insects, supplemental substances and so on would all interact realistically. Players might want to grow a lot of plant A, so they’d mix in some of complementary plant B to help it grow faster, and a few runners of plant C which attracts insect D, who help prevent insect E from eating all of plant A. All in all, it’s a kind of casual edutainment deal, with the ultimate objective of getting players to put down their joypads for ten minutes a day and take up small-scale gardening for real.

Alert readers will already be aware that I have a degree in economics. The main thing I learned from this is that our banking system is a fragile house of cards built on blind hope and empty promises. This blog isn’t the place to discuss the mess we’re currently in, but it is a place to invent games about it.

“It’s seeds and shotguns time!” is a phrase that’s I’ve read a lot recently, on some of the forums and blogs I read. My friends and I have jokingly discussed plans to emigrate and form a commune for years now, but the recent economic crisis seems to have spurred other people into thinking it’d be a genuinely good idea. Seeds and Shotguns explores this premise, giving players some basic knowledge of how to survive in such a situation, and presenting them with a more rounded, realistic experience than their Mad Max/Little House on the Prairie fantasies can conjure up. It’s not just about knowing when to sow what, or how to cycle your fresh water store, but also where to cache your excess food stock and who to shoot on sight. A bit like Fallout meets Harvest Moon.

Well, almost. The idea behind Metaquest is that the player takes on the role of an MMORPG developer, and must build up a game that attracts players. Money is spent on hardware, software and staff, which all determine how large your game can be and what you can put in it, which in turn determines how many players are attracted, and that forms your main source of income. Players will have to deal with gold farmers, community relations, changing player tastes, rivals, and so on, by controlling their game’s development on a number of levels – internal game structure, physical server management, possibly even office layout.

If you really want to be exciting, you could let players set up their own server and run their game as an actual MMORPG, although you’d have to severely limit the maximum number of connections. This is where Metaquest becomes a bit less like Dungeon Keeper and a bit more like Neverwinter Nights or Metaplace. Would it be worth the effort? Probably not!

I think it’s because I’m planning on getting a place of my own, soon – my mind is reaching out for things to decorate my future house with. Really, a cocktail cab would probably be a bit too impractical for my living room, but that hasn’t stopped me thinking about them. Anyway, this game was inspired by Microsoft’s Surface, which emerged victorious from the cocktail cabinet battle royale I held in my mind recently. I wanted a simple, fun, multiplayer game that you could play with your friends over dinner.

You select the number of players, and each player is given a virtual control panel that can be dragged around the table to a comfortable position. A little car pops out of each control panel – with different colours corresponding to different players – and begins to drive around the open space, following a simple AI routine. The control panels contain some statistical information, such as the car’s remaining health, fuel and ammo, and a list of ‘desires’ that the player must prioritise. Desires – such as “Attack Red Player” or “Collect Ammo” – can be dragged up and down in a list of preference, which feeds into each car’s AI routine to establish its particular behaviour patterns. Cars drive themselves around the table, collecting power-ups, attacking each other, and treating physical objects (such as plates) and virtual panels as impassable obstacles, until the game is manually declared over. The winner is the player who scored the most kills.

Players are given a sequence of randomly-shaped blocks of a particular colour; green, say. Once they have completed a solid, horizontal line, the line fuses together to form a ‘ghetto’. Then the player starts getting blocks of a different colour; say, indigo. Players must complete an equal or greater number of solid, horizontal, indigo lines on top of the green lines. Then the complete mass of indigo blocks crushes the green blocks underneath, dropping to the bottom of the screen and forming a new ghetto. Points are scored based on the number of lines crushed.

Obviously, it’s making a clever social statement about how racial segregation is an ongoing spiral of woe, and how socially segregated groups can escape the ghetto but others groups will just end up filling their void, and so on. Or maybe it’s just a load of coloured blocks?

Your objective is to destroy modern society by assaulting a string of contemporary strongholds, with the help of your heavily-armed pal.

Key to the game is that you must dodge your own attacks – the enemies are relatively weak, and exist mainly to precipitate combat. So as your cannons become bigger and badder, the game becomes harder.

The presentation of my game ideas comes from a cosmic guy called Dennis Greenidge, whose work is showcased in the short film Greenidge Meantime.