Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

GDC 2012: Good bad great design talk

 Posted by (Visited 15681 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Mar 012012
 

I seem to have neglected to mention that I am speaking at GDC next week!

I'm a GDC Speaker buttonI’ll be the last session of the Social and Online Games Summit, giving a quick half-hour session entitled “Good Design, Bad Design, Great Design” modelled after the blog post from a while back.

What makes a design good or bad? And more importantly, what makes it GREAT? And even more, does greatness even matter, when the goal is to make money? In this talk, industry veteran Raph Koster will look at an assortment of guidelines and aphorisms drawn from a variety of fields ranging from marketing to art theory, and see how they hold up. Raph will pay special attention to what they mean for the brave new world of social gaming. Hopefully you’ll leave inspired.

Takeaway: Learn why it makes sound financial sense to reach for greatness in your work, and discover some of the science behind classic design principles from other fields.

If you’re coming, see you Tuesday 5:05- 5:30 in Room 135, North Hall.

Edit: slides are posted here.

“Making of UO” articles at MMORPG.com

 Posted by (Visited 19820 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Feb 172012
 

Read them here: Ultima Online UO General Article: The Making of a Classic Part 1 and part two.

I wasn’t able to really sit down with Adam Tingle, the author, but he did run around the blog archives a fair amount. There’s some inaccuracies here and there, but it’s a decent overview.

Some things I spotted:

Throughout 1979 Garriott would design his computer role-playing game, revising it, adding to it, showing his friends, and finally when “D&D 28b” was finished, he renamed it Aklabeth…

It’s “Akalabeth” not “Aklabeth” — you can actually play it on your iOS device these days.

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Awesome paper on games math

 Posted by (Visited 19213 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jan 272012
 

Giovanni Viglietta of the University of Pisa has posted up a paper called “Gaming is a hard job, but someone has to do it!”. 

In it, he not only analyzes a variety games to determine their complexity class, but he also arrives at a few metatheorems that are generically applicable for all game design. In other words, “include these features and your game gains fun.”

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Narrative isn’t usually content either

 Posted by (Visited 22847 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Jan 262012
 

When I said that narrative was not a game mechanic, but rather a form of feedback, I was getting at the core point that chunks of story are generally doled out as a reward for accomplishing a particular task. And games fundamentally, are about completing tasks — reaching for goals, be they self-imposed (as in all the forms of free-form play or paideia, as Caillois put it in Man, Play and Games) or authorially imposed (or ludus). They are about problem-solving in the sense that hey are about cognitively mastering models of varying complexity.

Some replies used the word “content” to describe the role that narrative plays. But I wouldn’t use the word content to describe varying feedback.

In other words, perverse as it may sound, I wouldn’t generally call chunks of story “game content.” But I would sometimes, and I’ll even offer up a game design here that does so.

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