Jackpot Trivia

 Posted by (Visited 8415 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Mar 102015
 

A while back I mentioned a few game announcements coming soon. One was, of course, Crowfall, about which I hope everyone knows at this point. This post is about another one!

A year ago or so I started working with NTN Buzztime as a consultant– these are the folks who provide bar trivia to venues all over the country. You might have seen their stuff if you ever go to a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant, for example. They have been doing networked bar trivia for decades now.

I worked with them to revise the core trivia experience. The press release about the resultant game, Jackpot Trivia, went out today. The chief goal was to make playing trivia more of a local multiplayer game, and to get more people to feel good about playing when they’re in a world with terrifying trivia experts. And yet, you still want expertise to come out ahead… so it was a fun design problem. Read on for how we tackled it…

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Great design analysis of Angry Birds

 Posted by (Visited 16169 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 082011
 

This just got passed around the office: a UX design analysis of Angry Birds, touching on mental models of mechanics, feedback response times, short-term memory management, the importance of mystery (almost exactly equivalent to what I called “delight” in my book), the audio design, and the visuals and branding.

It’s like a little master-class wrapped up into a blog post, and a potent reminder that designers in other fields are perfectly capable of doing much of what we do — indeed, are often more expert in some areas. It behooves game designers to go learn the lessons outsiders can teach us.

In most commercial software interfaces, response time management is completely overlooked even by those who claim to be UI design experts. The developers of Angry Birds managed response time in a way that goes far beyond simply “faster is better”.

For example, in Angry Birds, it was possible for the programmers to have made the flight of the birds fast – very fast, but they didn’t. Instead they programmed the flight of the angry flock to be leisure pace as they arc across the sky heading for the pigs’ glass houses. This slowed response time, combined with a carefully crafted trajectory trace (the flight path of the bird), solves one huge problem for all user interfaces – error correction. The vast majority of software user interfaces have no consideration for how users can be taught by experience with the system to improve their performance. This problem is a vast and complex issue for screen-based trading systems where error correction is not only essential, but also career threatening.

via Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience.

Messages in mechanics

 Posted by (Visited 23728 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Jun 232010
 

Gamasutra has published an opinion piece by a Christian pop culture critic that is perceptive and cogent. In it, Richard Clark argues that games that place storytelling in a privileged position in the game design need to be judged by the same sort of critical and moral standards as we judge storytelling in any other medium.

I agree, of course as those who have read the book and blog know; that said, Clark seems to give a pass to games whose experience is more centered on mechanics:

Not all games call for these kinds of questions. Games like Tetris, Peggle, Torchlight, and Doodle Jump make a deliberate attempt to place gameplay first. The story and characters truly are intended to be containers for game play elements.

I think there are implicit lessons to be derived from mechanics too. So I am not inclined to give any games a pass on serious critical thought, regardless of whether they are heavy on story or not!

Is Loved less to be analyzed because it lacks cutscenes or detailed characters? Check out the comments on the review over at Casual Gameplay and see what you think (and if you haven’t played the game — be sure to play it with the sound on). Note how the game mechanics and content alter as you play based on mechanical choices. And notice how the fundamental questions the games raises are based on a mechanic: the choice to obey or not.

Times have definitely changed though — the comment thread on the Gamasutra piece is running heavily in favor of the article, which I don’t think would have been the case five years ago. Hopefully, we see the sophistication level of game critiques — and game content! — continue to increase as we think more about what we do.

Study: casual games help cognition

 Posted by (Visited 11111 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
May 262010
 

Researchers measured and tracked the participants’ brain waves via electroencephalography (EEG) — one group played the games, and a control group didn’t. The study found that subjects who played casual games for 30 minute periods showed an 87 percent improvement in cognitive response time and a 215 percent increase in executive functioning. This makes it, according to ECU, about as effective as other medical treatments for cognition.

via Gamasutra – News – Study: Casual Gaming Helps Cognition.

This comes on the heels of a BBC study challenging brain games’ efficacy. This new study was oriented around Popcap games like Bejeweled rather than custom-made brain games, though.

A few neat little games

 Posted by (Visited 7640 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Dec 082009
 

Just a quick post to note some games that have caught my eye lately. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen mention of some of these already.

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