Game talk

Looks like the book has landed on at least one syllabus as required reading! I spotted this today. I’m technically an adviser to the MIME program, but I’ve never actually gotten out there. 🙁

Today also saw Jamie Fristrom, he of Gamasutra columns and Spider-Man 2, write up some notes on the book. It’s an interesting take on the discussion of formal game design versus experience design. I don’t think that I quite meant what Jamie seems to be reading into what I wrote (which is probably my fault, not his!). As I wrote on the blog,

I don’t intend to come across like the dressing is unimportant, or only relevant to mass market games. Chapter 10 is all about how experience design matters, for example. I even use almost your chess example, only with go instead. I also say “The dressing is tremendously important. It’s very likely that chess would not have its long-term appeal if the pieces all represented different kinds of snot.” 😉

In the book I make the distinction between the person in charge of the formal abstract parts of games (what I called the “ludemographer”) and the person in charge of the game experience (call them the director, if you like).

The avenues of enjoyment beyond ludemography that the director taps into are well understood. They are story, they are art direction, they are music, etc. The thrill from getting the headshot, the tactile feel of real go beads on a wooden board. And even though they are well-understood, they aren’t EASY–so I think it’s perfectly valid for you to spend a lot of time thinking about those things.

I argue that the fun brought by pure ludemography is the core of gameplay and the part that is not as well understood as it should be, and that’s what the bulk of the book is about.

I’d definitely argue that 2d versus 3d brings in a whole bunch of new formal abstract qualities to a game, btw. 🙂

From a practical point of view, I’ll allege that if you have a fun game without real art, it can only get funner with better art, as Noel says. But as a corollary, if you have an unfun game, adding better art is not going to help.

Other places in the blogosphere where discussion of the book has popped up include
here, where the poster says,

Raph (Ultima Online) Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design is well worth checking out if you have an interest in the how and why of game design. It’s billed as Understanding Comics for video games, though I don’t think it quite lives up to that (the brilliance of Understanding Comics is in large part that it’s a demonstration; you’d have to make a game about video games to match it). Still, Raph is very smart and knows video game design. You can also check out an early comic form of the book (4.7Mb pdf).

Alas, a videogame that explained videogame theory was beyond my budget, and I doubt that my employers would have found it a commercially rewarding project. 🙂

Oh dear, over a month since the last update.

The book seems to be doing well. There’s some active discussion over at Grand Text Auto, which is an excellent blog focusing primarily on interactive storytelling and the narratological side of game studies. A lot of the discussion centers on whether the definition of fun in the book encompasses all forms of games, such as footraces.

There’s a heavy load of assumptions that goes into “fairness.” For example, competitive games of all sorts make use of leagues and handicapping in order to try to make things “fair,” and we take those for granted. In the case of athletics such as our hypothetical footrace, our hidden assumption is that training is part of the race, and training has rules that cannot be broken. And interestingly, training is a heavily cognitive task.

If training were not part of the race, then doping would be acceptable. But the magic circle clearly does not encompass only the moments between the starting gun and the finish line.

If that whets your appetite, head on over to take a look.

A special No-Prize goes to Richard Bartle, for being the first to spot an undeniable major factual error in the book. I refer, of course, to the bizarre mental slip that resulted in my conflating Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s piano work Pictures at an Exhibition
(Ravel’s orchestration being of course the version of the piece we know best) with Ravel’s orchestration of
his own Bolero, which was NOT written by Debussy as the book states. I plead cognitive failure, my chunks were in disarray. I shall now have to pore over Richard’s book in order to find a comparable egregious error that I can hold over him.

A review of the book accompanied by more discussion has appeared at Grimwell.com.

Raph didn’t just lay out a mental snack here, but one heck of a banquet, and it’ll be quite awhile before I’m done digesting it all. What you see here is a meager sampler platter that’s a far cry from experiencing the main course. Dropping the food analogy: my summary glosses over the ideas in this book, but can not adequately cover every one within without becoming as long as the book itself. (Besides, I imagine Raph could explain these ideas better than I could.) I would recommend everybody from avid gamers to the remotely curious to grab a copy from Amazon… At $13.59 a copy, you’ll find few better bargains.

Overall, I learned a lot from The Theory of Fun in Game Design, much of it helped to bring the thoughts of this gamer into alignment with the big picture of what gaming is all about. I’ll never look at game design in quite the same way again.

The discussion is quite stimulating, with comments such as Slyfeind’s question, “If games are destined to be art, why aren’t we there already? Or…are we?” The commentary also touches on what play is. Worth reading.

I am promised a review from Slashdot, but it hasn’t appeared yet. Nor, to my knowledge, has the interview I did with the Kansas City Star resulted in anything. Sigh. I am confirmed now as doing the opening keynote at the Serious Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference however. I have added reviews to the Press page as I find them.

Today I got my author copies in the mail. They look wonderful. I can’t wait until the book gets cruelly savaged on the Net. 🙂 Those of you who pre-ordered, I am told that the books will show up as shipping as soon as they get from the printer to the various booksellers. It should be in the next couple of days!

I spent a very nice couple of hours with William Huber during an abortive visit to UCSD. We discussed a lot of the material that the book covers… I believe I will be heading back to visit with Natalie Jeremijenko and her class and other faculty there sometime next week.

Gamasutra is excerpting a chapter from the book on their website starting on Dec. 3rd… I am also giving a version of the original presentation as part of the Serious Games Summit day at the Game Developers Conference 2005.

As you may have noticed, the website has been updated. Among the changes: there’s a Resources link now with ways to get every book, game, bit of music, and piece of artwork mentioned in the book. Think of it as an interactive bibliography. The press quotes have been moved to their own page along with the press release for the book. Lastly, the excerpts have been improved with Will’s foreword, a few of the cartoons, and a sample of the endnotes that accompany chapter one. The Stuff link is also now fairly populated. I’ve successfully ordered a few penguin t-shirts and mugs of the cartoons, so if you’re tickled by the artwork, there’s the crass cash-in for you.

Well, I’m all done voting. I’m also almost done proofing! Last night, we printed out the whole thing, both sides of the page, so what we got was something that closely resembled the book. Then for the first time, both my wife and I went over it with red pen, rather than doing editing on the computer… there’s something about that change of venue that makes it easier to see mistakes.

It looks like a couple of pages are running a bit long, so there will be just some minor touch-ups, but nothing too drastic. We’re pretty excited.

In other news, there’s actually stuff up in the Stuff section now–a mug, some shirts, and some mousepads. I’d love to hear what sort of stuff people might want…

I’ve also updated the front page with a bunch of quotes about the book that I have gotten from various folks. A special shout-out goes to Loren over at The Incremental Blogger, who commented on the book in his blog, saying,

The ISBN classification will call it a book about game design, but I’m guessing that the creativity and concepts will inspire designers and doers of all types.

The book’s genesis comes from a presentation that Raph gives on game design (5MB PDF). And no, this isn’t any ordinary PowerPoint slide presentation. Raph trades bullet lists for ink drawings. Words are limited to “See Jane run” simplicity. The result has a decidedly Lawrence Lessig feel about it and grabs your attention. And as a Tablet PC enthusiast the style shouts out “Tablet PC” to me.

The book is equally visual. It’s loaded with Raph’s illustrations. But it’s not all drawings–although with Raph’s conciseness that would be equally compelling. The manuscript is also filled with easy-to-read prose that’s interwoven with friendly insights and cerebral theories. I’m not finished reading the manuscript yet, but I just had to point out the book now. It gets the creative juices flowing.

Glad you liked it, Loren!

Sorry for the lack of updates–I was on the road all week.

I am up to chapter 11 (of 12) in the edits and rewrites. The copy editor has made it up through chapter two. I expect that we’ll have finished all the edits by the end of this week. I’ve updated the excerpt page with the new text, which hopefully reads exactly the same only shorter. I also put a table of contents on there.

It’s amazing how much editing can tighten up text. The downside is that I have been cramming a lot into the endnotes. They are getting rather long. Hopefully that won’t be a problem, but I guess we’ll see! So far, the endnotes range from discussing Laban’s notation system for dance to describing the effects of dopamine on the frontal cortex to a careful description of the gameplay in Defender.

My first CD, After the Flood, has been re-issued with a new bonus track–or rather, an old track that we didn’t include on the MP3.com edition because of space. The new edition also includes a lyric sheet in the booklet. You can hear little snippet samples on the website there too.

I’m having to redo one cartoon because we want to avoid any hassles with trademarks. If anyone has any ideas what would make a good cartoon to represent Grand Theft Auto, let me know. 🙂

Oh, and before I forget… signing up for the newsletter will let you get notified when stuff goes up on the store.