Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Researchers work on procedural fun

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    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.

    via Togelius: Automatic Game Design.

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  • What is a Diku?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 47 Comments

    I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives.

    — a comment from Daniel Speed on Broken Toys » Wikicrap.

    Glossing much here… Edit: this article is getting updated on the fly as people add comments and reminiscences.

    DikuMUD was derived from AberMUD, which was similar mechanics, but had more of a scavenger hunt mentality in some ways.

    At its core, it is a class-based RPG with the principal classes being fighter, healer, wizard, thief. (Later codebases added more). It was heavily based on the combat portion of Dungeons and Dragons. Advancement handled by earning experience points through combat, reaching a set amount of points, returning to town and “levelling up,” which unlocked new abilities. Classes were immutable (though eventually systems such as remorting, etc were added). Rewards for killing things also included equipment, which affected your stats and damage capability. If you reached the maximum level, common cultural practice was that you were invited to become a game admin (this practice dates back to much earlier, and existed in some form in MUD1).

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  • Reflections Across the Board: The “Music” of Game Design: Part 1

    Hours Categories Game talk

    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.

  • Database “sharding” came from UO?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 14 Comments

    Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term. What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?

    So I started reading a bit about it. It basically means running a bunch of parallel databases and looking into the right one, rather than trying to cram everything into one.

    Near as I can tell, a quick Google seems to say that the term came about because of a guy who worked at Friendster and Flickr, and seems to . Wikipedia has only had an article for a little while. In the comment thread at Lessons Learned, there’s mention of the term being used in 2006.

    Flickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending. In fact, I was quoted in Ludicorp’s business plan, and Stewart Butterfield had asked if I could be an advisor, but I couldn’t do it at the time because of my contract with Sony. Sigh. Anyway, I would be shocked if the term “shard” hadn’t been thrown around those offices… because in MMOs, of course, “shards” has a very specific meaning and history.

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