• CNet has an article on THQ using brain sensors to refine gameplay. I saw this sensor at GDC last year… The game industry doesn’t do nearly enough, overall, in terms of scientific assessment of their product. There’s a great playability lab at Microsoft that monitors players as they experience games, but there’s a really long way to go in terms of measuring people’s reactions to the content. Fortunately, there’s folks like Mark Terrano (who has a great diagrammatic method of measuring player engagement over gameplay time), Nicole Lazzaro, and Dan Cook thinking about this. 🙂

Read More “A few links of interest”

Somehow I forgot to blog this when it first appeared, and when I dug through my email, I found I had even missed an email from the author letting me know it went up!

The Startup Game: Using game design to build the next Digg or Flickr is a good article on Amy Jo Kim’s five key ways to apply game stuff to the web:

• Collecting
• Points
• Feedback
• Exchanges
• Customization

Worth checking out!

Anti-TD is a fun take on Tower Defense games: you play the never-ending march of invaders, and the computer places the towers.

I’ve talked a lot in the past about how games can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. Symmetrical games are ones where the capabilities of the player are comparable to the capabilities of the opponent: tennis, Quake, chess. Asymmetrical games are ones where the player and the opponent have differing games to play. This latter form really flourished with the advent of computers, but examples do exist from prior; for example, baseball or cricket can be viewed as alternating rounds of asymmetrical gameplay, and board games like Fox & Geese are asymmetrical.

Read More “Reversing asymmetrical games”

This article originally appeared in Massive quite a while ago… the mag seems to be undergoing some changes, including editorial turnover, alas.

Why Have Gold Anyway?

What with all the talk about RMT, how it affects a game, whether it’s something to be banned or embraced, and so on, it’s easy to lose sight of fundamental matters. Why is there gold in these games anyway? Should the games be about chasing wealth, or are we missing out on other styles of gameplay by focusing so much on acquiring shiny fake currency?

It’s worth stepping back and thinking about how these games work overall from a design perspective. After all, the games can mostly be boiled down into a pretty small and repetitive set of activities:

Read More “Why Have Gold Anyway?”