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.
A few months back, I got to aprticipate in a very very cool conference called “Ludium I,” organized by Ted Castronova. And today comes word that the Arden Institute webpage is now live, with the resulting conference report, institute whitepaper, and a 22 minute documentary on the conference.
A comment on a previous post prompted me to dig into an issue that has been tossed around a lot on the blogosphere, most recently in Jason Booth’s blog.
A long time ago now, I wrote in an essay called “On Socialization and Convenience” that
On LegendMUD (a fairly GoP environment, fundamentally) we added a socialization area with a bunch of nifty social facilities. The Wild Boar Tavern offers a lounge for chatting, goofy food to buy, an auditorium, a gift shop to buy goofy items like birthday cards, a wedding shop for in-game events, etc. You can reach it instantly from anywhere by merely typing “OOC.” It was there in an instant for anyone who wanted it.
It doesn’t get used.
On UO we had taverns with NPCs, dart boards, chess boards, backgammon, dice. There were multiple ones in every town. You know as well as I how crowded they were.
Leisure time in a mud is pointless time in players’ eyes, and only a small subset of your players will be looking to spend pointless time. (emphasis added)
Oren Sreebny’s Weblog has a summary of Will’s speech at When 2.0. As usual, it’s full of smart insights, though I am unsure I agree with his definition of story:
A story is a way of how to displace someone’s experience in time and space to apply it to another person. While you’re seeing one linear path of events, the drama is created by imagining all the other things that didn’t happen (“what would’ve happened if he had tripped here?”).
Another comment that resonates with the recent discussions here on story is this one:
Games are doing the same thing – looking for simple compact rules that can create large spaces of possibilities.
With the “interactive entertainment movie” sort of game, the large spaces of possibilities actually tend to be fairly small. As the “string of pearls” approach to narrative games puts it in its very metaphor, you have to bound the possibility space in order to string it up! Otherwise, you’ll end up with a very ungainly necklace.
Another sign (as if there weren’t enough already) that Will falls very very strongly on the “toys and models” side of game design, as opposed to the “interactive entertainment” side.
I agree strongly with Will’s recommendation of The User Illusion. It’s one of the best books on cognition and how we think.
Via Kim Pallister.
The upshot seems to be that we mostly all agree after all. 🙂
Seriously, though, worth reading over.
I get told that I am more interested in social experiments than in gameplay all the time. Frankly, I am a bit sick of it. So I want to rant.
I said this in the comments to another post.
A game where the only productive activity is to kill things is the social experiment. A game where people can dance at a bar is more like normal humanity. 🙂
