Good design is familiar.
Bad design is boring.
Great design is exciting.

Good design embraces human nature.
Bad design exploits human nature.
Great design is humane and humanistic.

Good design guides.
Bad design controls.
Great design invites.

Good design drives habit.
Bad design drives frustration.
Great design drives passion.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ian Schreiber posted on Twitter asking

Game designers: in your everyday use of the terms, is there a difference between “rules” and “mechanics”? If so, what?

I do make the distinction, and I had to think a bit about how to even phrase it. So here’s a quick thousand+ words on it.

First off, I think these are both terms that will feel different to a player vs a designer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Raph, aren’t there some situation where lack of feedback actually add to the experience? I’m thinking, for instance, something as simple as a game of hide and seek. You don’t really know if you’re well hidden until you’re found (or not)! Doesn’t “knowing you don’t know” add more tension and excitement?

-Olivier Carrère

Well, first of all, let’s not underestimate the amount of feedback there is for the hider while hiding; the sound of giggles and held breaths let go, the clear sounds of the seeker exploring the area, and depending on your location, actual visual tracking of the seeker. But all of that isn’t even really the feedback, as you state — it’s whether or not you’re found. Having to wait for that level of feedback is common in all sorts of games.

To address your question more specifically: yes, of course a certain amount of lack of feedback is fine. In the case of hide and seek, you are building a heuristic for “how the seeker seeks.” So it’s a psych game as well as a puzzle of finding decent hiding spaces. You are trying to determine how the seeker thinks, and outwit them. Worse, you have to do so with limited resources (limited environment, limited timeframe).

Read the rest of this entry »

I was mentioned in a comment on Google+, and ended up writing a little bit about game feedback as a result. So here it is.

The discussion was on the absence of combat logs (scrolling text windows showing you exact numbers for combat actions) in the new SWTOR MMO. Some folks regret the absence, because they use the logs to optimize what they are doing, and use it as a learning tool. Other players find them a legacy of the text mud days, or a feature that hastens the deconstruction of the entire system and therefore damages the fun factor.

Both sides are right, really. Combat logs are just a form of feedback. The more feedback the system gives you, the more information you have for the process of figuring out how the system works. This then makes the process of optimizing play easier (read that as “getting the results you want from a given input”).

The first thing to realize here is that everything the game shows you, really, is a form of feedback. The locations of chess pieces on a board, the “game state,” is a type of feedback. Numbers floating off the enemy are feedback; the glowy effect trailing a swinging sword is also feedback.

Some forms of feedback are better suited for certain types of information than others.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi this is N—–.

I am a jr in high school right now, we are doing something called a jr research paper, and the career that I chose and have been looking into is game design and I need to get an interview with a game designer, I was wondering if you could email me back and you may help me. If you have the time that would be really nice.

Thank you

Sure. Here’s my answers to your questions:
Read the rest of this entry »

Carey Martell, whose interview of Richard Bartle I blogged about not very long ago, stopped by the office here and did an hourlong interview with me, after we failed to connect at GDCOnline. There’s a little ancient history, some talk about the lecture I did at GDCO, and a brief sidebar on gamification in there, and I don’t remember what else.

RPG Fanatic: Raph Koster Interview – YouTube.

Yup, a tiny bit more.

• 10 things that I’m going to be thinking hard about following GDC Online 2011, feature, GDC Online 2011, PocketGamer.biz.
• The 25 Most memorable Quotes fro GDC Online 2011, Gamasutra

Side note, I am struck how little long-form coverage there is of talks anymore, now that so much blogging has moved to Twitter…

A bit more coverage of my talk at GDCOnline:

• gamesindustry.biz: Koster: It’s All Games Now | Blog entry.
• Massively: GDC Online 2011: Raph Koster speaks on the gamification of real life

Here are the slides for the talk that I gave today at GDC Online. I have to warn you that more than usual, you needed the performance, I think. So keep an eye out for when the video shows up on the GDCVault — I’ll be sure to let you know.

It seems to have gone very very well. Lots of positive feedback on Twitter and in the hallways afterwards.

If I had to summarize my message, I suppose I would rattle off this set of bullet points:

• We are losing (or changing) some qualities of games because of the contexts in which they exist now, particularly social media. We let the real world invade more — such as microtransactions and RMT — and we also let the real world shape design decisions — for example, giving up on the notion of not having global chat in you virtual world.
• We’re understanding games better than ever thanks to both design theory and real-world science. And also understanding ourselves as people better.
• That understanding is going into applying gamelike features to real life. Not just stuff like gamification, but also common features of social media that clearly draw heavily from game inspirations, such as quantified reputation systems, achievement systems, and even how our profiles look on social networking sites.
• This is made easier because we’re in a “cloud phase” in the evolution of computing. The pendulum always swings from cloud to local.
• But our local machines have gotten more accessible, but a lot less open over time, and the net result is that we don’t really control the cloud or our local devices now.
• The rub there for the game industry is that we have essentially ended up recreating the console ecosystem, only with iOS and Facebook instead of Sony and Nintendo, which doesn’t bode well for several segments of the industry.
• Instead, it just increases the odds that the process will accelerate, as we will be the product. Indeed, already our perception of reality has been greatly filtered by social media, and is less objective and inclusive.
• But we shouldn’t forget that we are the ones who define the rules here; we’re the wizards of the game world. Games are fundamentally social media and always have been.
• We will be OK, as long as we don’t forget that the point of games is not the points structures, but the people we played with, and the lessons we learned.

But summarizing it that way skips the fairytale I told, and the rapid-fire science-fiction story I told, and my brief Jonathan Coulton musical quote, and much more.

I ended on this hope from Ted Nelson:

I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.

You can read Gamasutra’s write-up here. I think it captures the essence pretty well!

• Here’s the deck as a PDF. (2.8MB)
• Here is the actual Powerpoint 2007 file (8.4MB). Um, the fonts are Garamond, Edwardian Script, Olde English, Poor Richard, and Adobe Gothic Std B. If you don’t have them, it’s likely to look a mess.

Some of you have already stumbled across this, so I figured I had better post about it! This is the video for the talk I gave at Casual Connect Seattle 2011. Slides were already posted on the blog here.