• On getting criticism

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 54 Comments

    Lately I have been working on multiple new games. And whenever you are working on games, of course, you get people to try them, and a lot of them don’t like what they see.

    I’ve gotten a lot of criticism over the years, and I haven’t always taken it the right way. These days, criticism comes from all directions, and work is often shared before it’s really done. It can be hard to know what to listen to and when to stick to your guns.

    Ultima Online is a Hall of Fame game. It averaged 6/10 in reviews. Star Wars Galaxies got a famously mixed reception, and closed down a while back; I still get fan mail.

    So here’s my takeaways from all those years of being told that my work sucks:

    Everyone who dislikes your work is right.

    Read More “On getting criticism”

  • GDCNext: Playing with ‘game’

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    I’ll be speaking at GDCNext on this, in the future of gaming track.

    Playing with ‘Game’

    Raph Koster  |  Designer, Independent
    Location: Room 515 B
    Date: Tuesday, November 05
    Time: 11:15am-12:15pm

    Never mind the future – the present of games is quickly carrying us well beyond the classic understandings of what a game is. We’ve got gamified restaurants, psychological self-help tools, immersive narrative experiences, quasi-gambling experiences, political statements and more. Along the way, we’re seeing conflicts between subcultures in our audience, and within our development community as well. Players get mad when a title isn’t what they expected. Developers watch the encroachment of business practices they dislike. Designers try to apply the tools of one genre to another, and find they don’t always work. Is “game” even a thing? And if it is, in what ways do these varied approaches relate to one another? In this lecture, we’ll take a look at a craft-centric approach to the question: what do we make, who do we make it for, and how can we best make what we want?

    Takeaway

    Attendees will learn about a framework for thinking about varied types of interactive experiences and the four types of problems that make for compelling play. They will also take away practical design checklists and techniques for these different approaches: top five tips for narrative experiences, ludic experiences, coercive experiences and so on.

    This isn’t the same thing as the blog post of the same name — though some of that material will be the first few minutes. Instead, it’s an attempt to synthesize understandings coming from different quarters about what games can be and what they can mean, and how they can be and mean. I am sure that there will likely be some stuff in there to annoy people from every faction! 🙂

    Most importantly, though, I want to focus back in on craft. Craft seems like it is often the forgotten root of all these approaches. Whether you are trying to make games that are personal, pure experience, narratively centered, systemically driven, emergent, linear, abstract, or Dadaist, there is always the how underlying it all. And “how” is interesting, because there’s what works for you the creator, and what works for a given audience, and in a very real sense, as creators we don’t get to quarrel with what the audience likes or accepts. It is always up to them whether to listen to what we have to say.

    So this talk is going to be about how as much as I can make it… about the raw tools that might help a designer in their goal of making either a polished AAA experience or a raw emotional outpouring.

    Hope to see you there!

  • Upcoming AMA on MMORPG.com

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    This is an early heads-up that I will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything over at MMORPG.com on the 16th at 7PM Eastern / 4pm Pacific. What about? Honestly, just about whatever people want. I can’t break NDA’s, of course, but I expect there will be hefty doses of nostalgia, a lot of discussion of worldy MMOs given the audience, and who knows, maybe I will talk a little about the games I’ve been working on lately.

    I’ll post again to remind everyone once we’re closer, of course. 🙂

    This should be fun; I haven’t been out there talking with players very much lately, and I miss it.

  • Pre-order Theory of Fun 10th Anniversary Revised Edition!

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
    Comments 9 Comments


    Yup, it’s up on Amazon for pre-order!

    For those who don’t know, here’s what is different:

    • Full color throughout.
    • Revisions on virtually every page.
    • Revised punchlines for a lot of the cartoons.
    • Substantial revisions to the chapter on cognitive styles.
    • Expansion of the sections on non-fun reasons to play games.
    • Some additional discussion of narrative.
    • All the science brought up to date.
    • A huge amount of new endnotes, including expanding on many of the existing ones.
    • A new afterword.
    • A new vertical layout so it fits on your shelf better!

    Looks like they currently have it set to come out on November 22nd. The book is still in layout as we try to get everything to fit perfectly, and we have to fill in my current bio. But all in all, it looks awfully close!

    Pre-order Theory of Fun 2nd Edition here.

     

  • Keynoting EVA 2013 in Argentina

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    evalogoI am off to Argentina this November, to speak at EVA 2013, put on by ADVA, the Argentine Game Developers Association. I fly back just in time to get to GDCNext immediately after — won’t even stop at home. It should be an exhausting week of travel.

    This is the talk I’ll be giving:

    El mundo de sistemas

    La definición clásica de “juego” siempre ha involucrado la noción de un “sistema” – un sistema mecánico, de retos y oponentes y matemática. Hoy en día vemos más y más juegos que son informados por nociones muy diferentes: la poesía del narrativo, el “duende” de la experiencia. Esto sucede a la misma vez que el mundo nos está revelando sistemas de todas clases, y las grandes corporaciones nos están metiendo en más sistemas diseñadas para mantenernos clientes. Es un mundo informado por los juegos – así que nos toca a nosotros, los diseñadores de juegos, entender el rol de nuestra obra, cuando a decir verdad tenemos poco entendimiento de los sistemas que nosotros mismos hemos creado. En esta charla hablaré de mis experiencias creando sistemas de juegos los cuales yo mismo no entendía, las responsabilidades que solamente los juegos pueden tomar, y del futuro en el cual fuimos nosotros los jugadores y diseñadores de juegos quienes educaron a la niñez.

    The systemic world

    The classic definition of “game” has always involved the notion of “a system” — a mechanical system, of challenges and opponents and math. These days we see more and more games that are informed by very different concepts: the poetry of narrative, the “duende” of experiences. This is happening just as the world is revealing to us all sorts of systems, and the big corporations are embedding us in more systems designed to keep us consumers of their products. It is a world shaped by games — and so it falls to us, the game designers, to understand the role our work plays, when we honestly don’t have a good grasp of the systems we ourselves have created. In this lecture I’ll talk about my experiences creating game systems that I myself didn’t understand, the responsibilities that only games can shoulder, and of the coming future in which it was we, the players and game designers, who educated the world’s children.

    And yes, I am going to do it in Spanish… I need the practice. 🙂

    I have never been to Argentina, so it will be nice to add another country to the map. I (perhaps naively) expect grass-fed parrillada for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 🙂