I think one of the hardest tricks in the world of game design is to put yourself in the shoes of the player. It’s particularly hard when we’re designing games for an audience that isn’t like us — and the audience that is usually least like us is the newbie.

There’s a blog of relatively recent vintage called, appropriately enough, Newbie, that illustrates this. It’s the experiences of a 46-year-old named Tom Miller who is not a gamer. He has trouble with puzzle games, and The Sims 2 utterly defeats him.

Read More “In the newbie’s shoes”

I don’t know if anyone remembers Tony Walsh’s speculation on how “Airport Screening Is A Badly-Designed Game”, but it looks like Ian Bogost & crew took up the challenge!

It does seem monstrously hard. 🙂 I seem to average three people before I lose.

Another day, another market research report for all the marketing guys who hang out on this blog… This one is from NPD, and it purports to reveal that core gamers aren’t who the industry thinks.

Key stats:

Read More “NPD market segmentation study”

But not by Harper’s but instead some random blog that appears to make a career out of scanning and OCR’ing articles out of magazines. How odd. In any case, it’s over here.

(For those who do not recall, this is a roundtable discussion on the topic of games and education that I participated in a while back).

There’s a Wired News article on games about the Arab-Israeli conflict out, in which I am quoted a fair bit.

As I told Quinn Norton, there’s a long history of games that deal with political issues. One of my favorites is Hidden Agenda, which is apparently abandonware today and still playable on a WinXP box. In this game, you take on the role of president of a newly democratic fictional Central American country called Chimerica. It’s dated today, set in the midst of the Cold War, but still packs a massive punch when you play it; trying to juggle the priorities of agrarian reform, free market economics, improved health care and education, and keeping the left and right wings of your populace is still an eye-opening experience.

Read More “Games as propaganda, games as statement”