This poem isn’t about what the title says, of course. Even though my family went through this, I don’t actually have any memory of it; it all happened when we were quite young.
One of the big points that people are making regarding class systems versus skill-based systems is that “skill-based systems are harder to balance.”
Balance is slightly stupid. As an overall concept when applied to co-op game systems, anyway.
Liveblogged at Functional Autonomy.
Part one is the talk itself:
Making games is like the scientific method in reverse. A small number of algorithms are meant to generate many possiblities. Games have topology, and that topology has to be as interesting as possible.
Old media are just rides. They’re linear.
And part two is Q&A afterwards.
Q: What’s your favorite game? (Laughter from cynical bunch of game developers)
A: My favorite game is an old Chinese board game called Go. It has only two rules, but really deep strategy. Games are meant to have simple rule sets that generate maximum possibility space. Go seems to have the best ratio in that respect.
Aaron Ruby, co-author of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution, has written an interesting article on NextGeneration entitled “A Theory of Games For Just About Everyone.” In it, he tries to tackle the big questions about what play is, what games are, and so on.
Traditionally theorists have made a distinction between freeform play (paideia, etc) and goal-oriented play (ludus, etc), and even gone so far as to deny the former the status of “game.” Aaron is out to demolish that:
…’play’ and ‘game’ have been largely defined without reference to the other. And in both instances, definitions have proved incredibly hard to come by and tremendously slippery. Inevitably they have ended up being both too narrow and too broad at the same time, excluding items we accept in our day-to-day life as qualifying while including others that don’t.
Vivendi filed a investor slideshow with the SEC that gives some data on WoW and also their new Sierra Online Games division, which they recently pulled together. Things that pop out:
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