GDCA: Games Are Math slides posted

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Sep 222009
 
Using isomorphic graphs to analyze MMORPG combat

Using isomorphic graphs to analyze MMORPG combat

I have posted up the slide deck (PPT) and a page of images of slides for my GDC Austin talk, “Games Are Math: 10 Core Mechanics That Drive Compelling Gameplay.”

This talk starts out with some game grammar stuff that may be familiar, then moves into looking at a definition of NP-complete problems, then provides ten examples of how they can be used to look at games, then finishes by examining cognitive bugs in the brain that many games exploit. Please note, I am not a mathematician nor even claim to be very good at math. 🙂

As usual, this along with all my other talks can be found on the Gaming Presentations page, reached by clicking “Games” on the top bar of the site, then choosing Presentations from the sidebar. For those of you who never click the top bar and think all that is here is the blog — there’s a wealth of stuff available there. 🙂 I’ve recently updated it to include a few presentations that were buried and hard to find, such as the audio for my Games For Change closing address, the videos for Living Game Worlds IV and Siggraph Sandbox, and more.

GDCA: Greg Costikyan’s talk on randomness

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Sep 222009
 

Randomness has been part of games since their earliest inception — and when I say “earliest inception,” I mean deep into the unwritten Neolithic past. Game scholars sometimes point to The Royal Game of Ur as the earliest known game, and in a sense it is — but we also know of games from any number of Neolithic cultures that survived into the modern era, many of them documented by Stewart Cullin in a series of books for the Smithsonian, published in the early 20th century.

— Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture.

Go read, it is awesome.

GDCA: Gamasutra’s write up of Games Are Math

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Sep 182009
 

Gamasutra – News – GDC Austin: Raph Koster’s Deceptively Simple Coin Toss. It’s got a couple of images. 🙂

He offered several examples of complex games broken down into abstract graphs. For instance, he took the strategy board game Blokus, in which four players use tiles of various shapes to try to block other players’ ability to place a piece. Only corner-to-corner contact is allowed between pieces of the same color. No edges can touch, and the object is to use as many of your allotted tiles as possible.

AGDC: Games Are Math writeup

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Sep 182009
 

Xemu’s Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings :: AGDC ’09: Raph Koster on Games and Math is a liveblog of the talk I gave a couple of hours ago here at GDCAustin.

The talk was first a very brief intro to game grammar approaches, followed by digging into the math behind very common game mechanics that have stood the test of time, and then lastly a look at some of the “bugs” in human cognition that games tend to exploit. It was supposed to be an intermediate talk, not superadvanced, so I hope I hit the right levelof complexity for everyone!

The room was pretty packed — 300 people, I am told! There’s also commentary on Twitter if you go looking.

I will try to get the slides up soon.

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