The ongoing discussion on irc/twitter/this blog about how the theme ‘escape’ enabled almost every game idea to fit somehow made me pondering, if there is some link to this big amount of new participants in LD21. So my theory goes like that:

• the theme was very open, so newcomers could submit almost every kind of game
• this encouraged a lot more people to try and made something very simple and stuck some sort of escape to it
• would the elected topic have been something like self-replication or recursion, the amount of submitted games would have been less

Especially the themes stated above probably would have needed a deeper insight to programming techniques and game design principles which could have put a lot of people off. Any opinion to this theory?

To fire the discussion, I can even give a counter-argument:

• There were so many new people attracted before the final voting ended (by notch, etc), that they had a significant influence on theme voting.

Tags: Discussion, theme