I don't know how the rest of you do it... I'm only a third of the way through the slaughter. Things keep getting in the way, like doing work or spending a half-hour writing down a complex game idea that was inspired by one of these themes. But anyway, I figured I could post this now and possibly do follow ups later if I found more.

When slaughtering themes, I have a rule that the theme shouldn't limit the game genre or the type of game. So there's been several themes that I have to slaughter on that rule that regardless of if I think could make interesting game from it. Here's some I came across: * You are a tile - Implies the use of tilesets and games where you have an overhead view or sidescroll, but I can imagine a short puzzle game where you have to cover holes in the tilemap for NPCs to walk over or interact with. * Fleeting Memory / revisiting memories - There imply a story-based game. And possibly an interesting one, if done right. * Snowball fight - I don't think I've yet seen a game that did a proper snowball fight that wasn't just using some preexisting combat system, but I also can't see how one does this in a story-based or puzzle game unless it's just background dressing maybe. * Second Person Shooter - I've seen this game already. It's called "Zato". You watch from the pov of the enemies and had to line up the player character to fire on them. Interesting concept, but not a good theme. * Multiple Beginnings, One End - An interesting concept if you were to put it into a narrative video game, as long as that one end is not just "and then they die". But kinda precludes other genres. * Social Samurai - I feel like the person who submitted this had a very specific game in mind... Like one of those social combat games. * You are a one sided lover - This one just seems tragic when ported to something that's not a narrative game. Like imagine this inspiring a first-person shooter. No, wait, let's not.

Here's some other themes that simply struck me before I slaughtered them: * No penguins allowed - Wouldn't that mean that every game that doesn't include a penguin is following the theme by default? * Siege the moment - I can't decide if someone misspelled "seize" and autocorrect did them wrong, or if someone seriously wants us to make a game about setting up a blockade around a moment in time... * World Wild Web - Again, misspelling, or a network of animals? I'm thinking something that might be found on that old kids show Zaboomafoo. * Mom's spaghetti - Well, at least it wasn't "time", "light", "death", "reality", "evil" or one of the other abstract concepts that made up like 70% of the other themes I slaughtered, but one has to wonder if this person was in the process of being called down to dinner when making their theme suggestions.

I've been saying for the past 4 days (or million years, however long this theme slaughter has been going on for, I can't tell anymore) that there seems to be several duplicate themes in this year's batch of themes, and that they should de-dupe the themes before giving them to us.

Turns out, no, it's just that the theme voting page is entirely broken.

There's been a few people in this feed that have pointed out that the recent themes list when you load the page is always the same. This I think is indicative of the bigger problem. The page seems to not be keeping track of the themes that have already been voted on entirely. I pulled open the JSON giving the web page all the themes to vote on. (Incidentally, the 10 themes on the recent list here are the first 10 themes in the JSON, go figure.) (EDIT: Just not in my screenshot, I just realized, because it's apparently keeping somewhere that I haven't voted on some of the themes, but it's not filtering out voting based on that?! What even is going on here...?)

"All about perspective" is in the list exactly once. But I've voted on it at least three times, once because I liked it, once again later as it was a duplicate (and that made my recent themes list all red, which I thought at the time was odd), and once more today, just now, and look, there's a green in my recent themes list that's there again!

"It's not a bug, it's a feature" is a distinctive theme that I remember not liking (why would you make a weird development concept into a game?), and I voted on it a second time just moments ago! I wondered how many times it had been submitted. I went and checked, and lo it's only in the JSON once. This whole exercise is now pointless if you can't do it in one sitting, because if you don't, you're going over old ground again, while simultaneously you'll never see some themes! Why even bother counting how many themes we've slaughtered if you're not going to keep track of which ones we've seen already!

Basically what I'm saying is, I'm giving up. I'd rather not have to rejudge the same 1500 themes again and again and again simply because I didn't do it in one sitting and got logged out. Now excuse me while I go upend a table.

Incidentally, while I have the JSON here:

• "Time" is a word in 87 submitted themes this time around (not counting where it's part of another word).
• "Space" is part of 32 submitted themes.
• "Light" is in 28 themes.
• "Power" is in 38 themes.
• "Death is in 23 themes, while "Life" is in 58 themes (not exclusive).
• "Islands" is only in 6 themes, the same number of times as "Climate".