Oct 272008
 
Dan's STARS model of game atoms

Dan's STARS model of game atoms

Dan Cook continues to outpace me on game grammar work, now with a delicious set of slides on applying skill atoms to application design. I already mailed it to several folks here in the office.

Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides.

I just saw that a book was released the other day that teaches people how to use GoogleDocs. The more complexity that you add, the closer you get to something like Word. When we add ‘features’ we hurt learnability and end up turning off users.

Hacks:

  • Segmenting features by user skill level,
  • Layering less commonly used or expert features so they are out of the way.
  • Creating a unifying UI metaphor that lets users understand new tools more easily.
  • Elegant information architecture and clean visual design.

Fun in class, in sex?

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Oct 132008
 

When a game designer (or student) first starts trying to define why games are “fun” they have trouble even conceptualizing it beyond “I know it when I see it.” Then they encounter Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and/or Koster’s Theory of Fun and have this huge epiphany: Eureka, all fun comes from learning a new skill! Then after awhile, they enter another stage of questioning this: wait a minute, if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material? Why is sex fun (by some standards), and yet doesn’t involve mastery (ahem, again by some standards)? At any rate, you could think of this as three stages of evolution of a game designer, and different designers are going to be in different stages, and when they encounter one another there will be chaos when they start discussing the nature of “fun.”

Teaching Game Design: Lessons learned from SIEGE.

Some interesting questions there.

  • “if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material?”

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Play driving games to reduce car insurance?

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Oct 102008
 

Could playing computer games enhance mental agility enough to turn people over 50 into better drivers? Allstate Corp. wants to find out, and if the answer is yes, it might offer insurance discounts to people who play the games.

Alas,I am not old enough to qualify. But it sure seems like a classic application of my theory of fun. 🙂

PsycPORT.com | Testing whether computer games can improve driving.

(Via Morgan).

Aug 292008
 

This is a nice blog anniversary surprise!

I don’t know for how long, or why (maybe the publisher stuff is sorted out? Maybe someone found a cache of them hidden under a mossy rock north of Pirate Cove) — but it’s claims 1-3 weeks shipping time, and it’s $17.24, and it’s not used copies. As you may or may not know, it’s been out of print since last October or so, and copies have been going for as high as $300.

If you’ve been waiting, now might be the time to order it!

Theory of Fun for Game Design @ Amazon

BTW, if any current owners want to review it, it could use some fresh reviews…

Aug 062008
 

Forbes.com has an interesting article on the casual games bubble bursting, that mentions that the portals aren’t really exploiting the long tail. They’ve trained their customers to grab games from one of three genres only, and cycle stuff off the top so rapidly that a game with a six month ramp to success (such as Peggle) need massive marketing pushes in order to be profitable.

But the biggest problem facing casual game developers is the Web portals they depend on for the majority of their sales. Most developers provide their games to portals for free in exchange for the mass audience drawn in by a Big Fish Games or a PlayFirst. In exchange, portals receive a 30% to 40% cut of revenues. Since the casual game portals make the most cash off spikes in game sales, it behooves the portals to constantly feature new content. The best games are lucky to survive on a portal’s front page list for more than a month.

It goes to show that it’s easy to make a shelf-based, hit-driven business even in a long-tail sort of environment. The article comments that this situation could be fixed if the portals ran more like Amazon or Netflix, marketing their back catalog much more aggressively instead of only grabbing the latest. On the other hand, this may be tricky for games, which are so heavily driven by neophilia: playing old games is a tough sell often, because as the Theory of Fun tells us, if you’ve moved on from a game, it is probably not fun for you anymore.

In the long run, this isn’t good for the portals, as their smaller developers exit the market in search of more financially rewarding pastures. Social networks are mentioned — I think many of these developers are in for a shock as to how different an environment Facebook is from Big Fish.