Project Horseshoe, 2008, report, section 5 specifically is the game grammar take on multiplayer games. Wish I could have been there!
Project Horseshoe 2008 reports
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Feb 122009
Researchers work on procedural fun
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Jan 122009
Developing behaviors via genetic algorithms of various sorts has been around a long time now. You come up with a basic environment and ruleset, then you let loose millions of generations of simple AIs to keep trying to surivive. You then have the AIs tweak themselves based on what survived well, attempting to evolve the best survivor.
This can be used for lots of purposes — and now it’s being applied to game design. Starting with a simple Pac-Man like environment, researchers are generating zillions of procedural games, and then testing to see which is most fun. But how to measure the fun?
It should be pretty straightforward to see how game rules can be represented to be evolved: just encode them as e.g. an array of integers, and define some sensible mutation and possibly recombination operators. (In this particular case, we use a simple generational EA without crossover.) For other rule spaces, some rules might be more like parameters, and could be represented as real numbers.
What’s the much trickier question is the fitness function. How do you evaluate the fitness of a particular set of game rules? …
Our solution is to use learnability as a predictor of fun. A good game is one that is not winnable by a novice player, but which the player can learn to play better and better over time, and eventually win; it has a smooth learning curve.
Reflections Across the Board: The “Music” of Game Design: Part 1
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Jan 082009
Here’s a cool, very game-grammary approach to board game design that is inspired, as my initial game notation work was to some degree, by music.
What I arrived at was a series of “discoveries” or “conclusions” about specific models of game design that I assert can help one in the process of identifying not only problems in a game design but also what may be lacking or not present yet that could help a game reach the next level. As I arrived at these conclusions, I found that they felt very much like many of the typical principles of composition that I encountered while studying music.
via Reflections Across the Board: The “Music” of Game Design: Part 1.
The bulk of the article ends up examining a particular “atom” called the “Tri-Level Resource Exchange Model.” Atoms like these are usually termed “design patterns” in software. The article lands at identifying the number 5 as apparently very important in this model; I don’t think it is coincidence that it fits nicely in the famous 7 +/2 range.
Original Theory of Fun & Grammar of Gameplay talks reposted
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Dec 242008
The “Theory of Fun” website is down, caught between two webhosts, and has been for a while (with the book out of print, it hasn’t been a priority to sort out). But I keep getting requests for the materials that were hosted there and not here, so here they are.
- The PDF of the original AGC 2003 keynote and Serious Games Summit 2004 keynote, “A Theory of Fun.” This is the black and white cartoon one with the low-res, that turned into A Theory of Fun for Game Design, the book.
- The PDF of the GDC 2005 advanced design lecture “A Grammar of Gameplay,” which sort of kicked off the current wave of “game grammar” stuff. As you can see, Dan Cook’s diagrams are much prettier than mine. 😉 Just picture one of his atoms fitting inside one of the boxes I drew though.
- The PPT of the Training Fall 2005 keynote “Why Games Matter,” which is sort of rehashing ATOF for a non-game-developer audience.
Wired makes the case for more torture in games
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Dec 152008
If you weren’t sick of this debate already, here’s more.
So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft‘s torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.
This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.
For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?
— “Why We Need More Torture in Videogames“, Clive Thompson in Wired
