[...] Attendee Dan Cook, on Lost Garden, said of Horseshoe, “Sparks were flying. And hay. Don’t forget the hay. … It gave me faith that if you just get the brightest people of our industry off their isolated islands and give them a chance to talk, amazing ideas are inevitable. Experience shared is multiplied, not diminished.” And Raph Koster’s Horsehoe talk, “Influences,” attracted much post-conference comment. [...]

Goals of course can be very diverse, can be different for different users, change with time, etc. yet still most of games i can remember are goal-driven. one 2L player may want virtual date, another make $$ for his store yet in each case there is clear goal and some ways of achiving it.

It seems your challange is goal-less games, medtiation expiriences. Flapping: it wasn’t a game as long as it was “zen” of flapping. flapping for the “goal” of flapping. as soon as you put in clearly defined goal with flapping becoming a tool to achive a goal it snaped back to goal-driven hunter-gatherer expirience of typical game (“analize, predict, plot strategy, act”).

Math imho is just byproduct. it works great to describe goals, describe actions and the process how actions translate into results. remove goals and there will be little math. The final question i ended up with: will our hunter-gatherer culture play (massively enough) in something about expirience, not attaining results? will hunter-gatherer just enjoy flapping the bird for the zen of it, instead of stoning the damn critter, roasting it on campfire, enjoy his +10xp for the kill, +20 for cooking skill roll and go on on his merry way to solve the next goal?

It’s the spiders I tell you!

[...] Comments [...]

Welcome back.

Yehuda

Thanks, as always, for great blog-fodder and even better – for your well thought and well intentioned challenges to the status quo of design!