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.
First-Person Tetris. Basically, as you play, you rotate blocks. But when you rotate the block, the screen rotates. It is very cool to see how much this single difference in the feedback and controls changes the game — practically a game grammar example! 🙂
Saw this go by!
The San Francisco UX Book Club will hold its next meeting on Wednesday, January 20th at 7-9PM.
The meeting will focus on “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster. Kevin Cheng (http://kevnull.com/) will be moderating.
We are still trying to confirm the venue. I’ll update that information later this week!
Wish i could be a fly on the wall! It’s interesting to see the book used for UX design discussions.
There’s a Facebook page where the event is getting coordinated. So if you are in the area, maybe you’d like to check it out!
For those who haven’t seen Kodu, it’s a visual game development environment originally created for educators and running on the Xbox 360. It uses pie menus, and a game controller, and basically, a graphical language based around trigger events, to allow even children to develop games.
ArsTechnica is reporting that Kodu now runs on the PC as a beta. There’s more details here at Microsoft’s news center.
The inspiration for Kodu came from MacLaurin’s daughter. A few years ago, MacLaurin noticed his daughter, then 3 years old, watching his wife browse her Facebook page. He flashed back to his early experiences with a computer, comparing the passive experience his daughter was having to the coding he did to interact with the machine. It was a sad realization, he said…
…MacLaurin and his Microsoft Research team set out to recapture that magic. Through the basics of programming, they wanted to teach youngsters how they could create new worlds from their imagination. Two years later, Kodu was a hit on Xbox LIVE and was being used in more than 60 educational institutions across the globe to introduce children to programming.
Korea Supreme Court rules virtual currency convertible – PlayNoEvil
I think the headline says it all.
There is a wonderful new blog up called The Psychology of Video Games, written by Jamie Madigan, who has a PhD in psychology. It basically looks at individual “brain hacks” so to speak and explains specific incidents in games using them (similar to how I’ve referenced these brain hacks in that Games Are Math talk, in the second half; or even in A Theory of Fun)…
So far he has done posts on
The articles are lucid and funny… love the use of footnotes for humor. 🙂 And it’s a great intro to the overall topic for those of you who have not dug into this stuff before. I can’t want to read more.
To be sure, some players get lots of kill streaks because they are tiny, radiant gods of destruction whose skills at the game put every last member of the Boston Celtics to shame (who prefer Halo 3, after all). But skill aside, does the kill streak system in MW2 work in the sense that it gives players some momentum that propels them towards otherwise unreachable acts of virtual carnage? Is a player who has 10 kills in a row any more likely to get the 11th one needed to unlock a kill streak reward than he is to get the first kill?
Nope, says the science of psychology and basic probability theory. It’s all in their head because splash damage and javelin glitch abuse aside, each shot is basically an independent event. For any given player, any perception of kills clustering together more than usual is just a product the human brain’s tendency to see patterns where there are none –a phenomenon called “apophenia” by psychologists trying to win at Scrabble.
