400 Years: a game where you strategically wait in order to overcome obstacles

400 years is an adorable and clever browser-game where you play a kind of ambulatory stone pellet on a quest, wherein you overcome obstacles by holding down the spacebar to make the seasons fly past and the years go by, while a tree grows tall enough to climb, or winter arrives and freezes a pond so you can cross it. But don't hold the spacebar too much -- you've only got 400 years to get through the game!

Play 400 years, a FREE online game on Jay is Games (via Waxy)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

The headline had me rolling my eyes, but this is actually an awesome idea – I thought it was going to be some kind of conceptual thing, but you could take this concept pretty far.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  When I worked in the hospital, a lot of my co-workers were in a constant state of conniption trying to make things happen Right This Second. After about a year, I discovered that 90% of those things happened on their own if I just waited ten minutes. Not only did I have much more time to devote to doing a better job; when I did have to contact another department to get something done Right This Second, they responded immediately because they knew that I wasn’t prone to conniptions.
  - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
    
    Plus life lessons! Good stuff.
  - ocker3
    
    Today I called central office to start getting a problem resolved and the person on the phone was surprised by the amount of information I had ready at hand to give them without being asked for it. I’ve just learned from experience what is needed and have it to hand rather than wait to be asked, it saves everyone’s time and the people I speak to more than a few times are usually happy to hear from me.
  - http://mychemicaljourney.blogspot.com The Chemist
    
    You’ve mentioned working at a hospital before, and I’m working at one now, and I sense we both had/are having similar experiences. I don’t even do anything important there and I feel the crushing weight of bureaucracy and mismanagement that seems to be common in hospitals.
    
    It’s completely changed the way I view the industry.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Hospital culture definitely varies by organization. When I worked at UCSF, we all complained a lot, but after working at Kaiser SF for a couple of years, UC seemed like Plato’s Republic.
originalritz

It’s like Braid but altering time by the year instead of momentarily. I guess that’s why your character is a rock!
Mr. Son

It’s fun to think of some rock guy wandering into town one day, then just standing there perfectly still for years.
- http://newnumber6.livejournal.com Peter
  
  If they haven’t already done it in this game, they should do a sequel, where if you hit space in town, you wind up with graffiti all over you.
Kenmrph

Makes me think of one of my favorite short films, “Das Rad”: http://vimeo.com/7867746
oasisob1

Too late, the world has burned to ashes… Success is fun, too, sort of.
SamSam

A lot like Braid, which was one of the most incredibly original games I’ve ever played (and have never managed to finish it). Just a single dimension, instead of braiding time and space through themselves, of course, but a lot of the feeling is the same.