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.
Go read the post and the thread. I commented somewhere in there.
FWIW, I think the best background for a designer is a broad education with an emphasis on liberal arts and humanities; and the best personal qualification is intellectual curiosity and a dedication to self-education.
This is why user-created content works.
During the Q&A, a french canadian developer got up there. Not a wimpy looking guy, your typical tatoo’d programmeur-du-jour, and said the following (written in phonetic-quebecois-english for full effect)
“You talk about de need for critical acclaim. And you talk about de need for de big boodget. Der is a painting in France called de monah-leesah. It is famous. It might be very expensif too, if you can buy it, but you can’t buy it.”
Then he pulls out a peice of loose leaf paper from his pocket and unfolds it, holding it up in front of 600+ people, to show a cartoon drawing. Noticably choked up, he says, “Dis is a picture dat my son drawed for me. This drawing makes me cry, and de monah leesah doesn’t effect me one damn bit”.
To quote something I said a very long time ago now,
The thing is that people want to express themselves, and they don’t really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn’t. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?
In these days of mass media, of broadly targeted disposable entertainment, we tend to forget that the core of entertainment was a person telling a story around a campfire, it was dancers in a circle, it was singing for spirituality, it was ballads that carried the news from province to province, it was writing as a holy act–the notion that one’s words might live beyond one’s life simply astonishing, potent and fraught with eternity.
Today’s mass media is a historical aberration, and it’s a recent one. As little as 100 years ago, music was something experienced in the parlor, with your friends. Every household had a musician, and music-making was democratic.
One of the things that Chris Anderson likes to talk about regarding the Long Tail is that the hit-driven market makes products that are moderately to marginally satisfying to large groups of people. But niches target people who really want the product in that niche. Their satisfaction with the product is much, much higher. That’s why I listen to Grassy Hill Radio on the web — because it satisfies me more than the local radio stations do.
As recently as a month ago, a bunch of teenagers writing deeply personal thoughts for a tiny audience of their friends was sold to a major media conglomerate for a few hundred million dollars. Small is the new mass media.
The Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society has just reviewed A Theory of Fun
By skilfully traversing topics from cognitive science, to mathematics, to psychology, Koster integrates a number of disciplines into his theory of fun…. Koster successfully bridges the gap between game design practice and academic theory… For anyone interested in the relationship between games and human experience, this book is a must-read.And for those wanting to design their own games, this book is a definite must have… a welcome addition to the libraries of both gamers and non-gamers alike.
Lost Garden: A Game Business Model: Learning from Touring Bands is basically a very in-depth look at the broad market positioning, economics, and development lifecycle of what has in the past been called “boutique MMOs” but which Dan Cook (the author of the blog) calls “village games.”
I love the term. 🙂 In any case, Lost Garden is one of the best game blogs out there, for those who don’t know. Hmm, I should add a blogroll on here.
Go read “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days” at Gamasutra. Seriously. (I spotted it over at Game Girl Advance–thanks!).
To quote the article:
Handy Cut-Out List!
Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind
- Embrace the Possibility of Failure – it
- Encourages Creative Risk Taking
- Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
- Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
- Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
- Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter
Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming
- Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
- Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
- Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype
Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares
- Build the Toy First
- If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
Cut Your Losses and “Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib”- Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or “You Can’t Polish a Turd”)
- But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
- Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering
General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun
- Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
- Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep ’em Crawling Back for More
- “Experimental” Does Not Mean “Complex”
- Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
- Make it Juicy!
A lot of these elements were things that became very apparent during the writing of AToF. As I wrote the book, I also spent a lot of time designing puzzle games and board games. The successful ones had some elements in common:
To my mind, the practices described in the article are exactly how you learn the basics of game design. And losing sight of them is exactly how you lose sight of fun.
Raph’s game design prototype kit
- Two decks of regular cards.
- One deck of Uno cards.
- One Go board.
- One Checkers board.
- A half dozen six-sided dice.
- One full set of polyhedral dice.
- A large stack of differently colored index cards.
- Twelve pounds of differently colored beads. Go to the pottery aisle at your local craft store–these are the kind that get put in fish tanks and potted plants. It’s a bit more than a buck for a pound of one color.
- Wooden pieces, also from the craft store. These are found in the aisle with the clock faces:
- wood cubes, various sizes
- colored flat squares, three sizes
- dowel rods
- ‘pawn’ pieces
- wooden chip (circles)
- assorted circles, hexagons, stars, etc
- Blank wooden clock faces that you can draw boards on.
- Wood glue
- Dremel tool
- Square glass chips (also from the craft store, asst colors)
I keep it all in a chest I bought for the purpose.
On the PC: I use BlitzBasic. Either Blitz3d or BlitzMax, usually BlitzMax. Lua is also good for the purpose, though it’s syntax drives me nuts.
