• Help me revise A Theory of Fun!

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
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    Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Fun as a book. The publisher is planning a second edition in full color!

    The contract isn’t signed just yet, because I owe them an outline for the revisions. Needless to say, I get to do revised text, and this is where I would like to ask for help. The book is so widely used by folks in the industry that I want to make sure that it has all of the right stuff in it — updated science, latest thinking on game cognition and learning, new thoughts on game ethics — all of it.

    I would love to get more eyes on the problem. So if you’re up for it, I would love for as many people as possible to

    • (re)read the book – hey, it’s short!
    • make a note of everywhere you want to argue, and tell me where and why. I’ll argue back in the actual text (well, I’ll try to make my case better, how’s that).
    • make a note of any useful or cool references, science, news, or whatever that fits with what is already there. A lot has happened in ten years.
    • any errata? (I already know about the mistake in the drawing of the go board… anything else?)

    I realize this is a huge favor… needless to say, anyone who helps will get acknowledged in the new edition.

    Another thing that has come up occasionally is use of the book in a classroom setting. If anyone here has ideas on how to make it better for that use, I’d love to hear about those too. Are you an academic who has used the book in a classroom setting? Do you have study guide questions or discussion topics? I am currently unsure whether this sort of material would land in the book or on the website, but given how widely it’s used for this purpose, it seems like a great resource to make available.

    Finally, there’s the possibility of adding other new stuff. I don’t want to try cramming game grammar into a single new chapter, but… if there were additional material of some sort in the book, like a whole new chapter, what would you want it to be?

    Feel free to add whatever you can in the comment thread here, or to use the contact form to connect with me on this (I’m not going to post an email address here, to avoid spam, but if you use the form, I can email back).

    I’m excited about this — though I do expect that most of my time will be spent coloring the cartoons. 🙂

     

  • GDC China 2012 keynote: How Games Think

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    How Games Think title slideI have finally gotten around to posting up the slides and the notes for my talk delivered in Shanghai just before Thanksgiving.

    The notes are actually pretty representative of the actual speech as delivered — we had real-time translation going on, so I kept the pace very deliberate and avoided my usual rattle-stuff-off-a-mile-a-minute sort of delivery. If you go to this link you can see the slides as individual images with the notes interspersed.

    If that isn’t to your taste, and you want just the slides, you can find a PDF of the slides here instead.

    Afterwards, one of the Chinese attendees came up to me and told me it had been “a faith-building talk.” I can only presume that the folks working in the industry in China have the same crises of faith that we do here in the West. 🙂

    There was some coverage in Chinese, I am sure, given that there were reporters there from a few sites. But the only article I’ve found from China is this one. However, Gamasutra was there, and wrote up an article.

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  • Keynoting GDC China

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    I’ve been sadly neglectful of this blog! In the last few weeks, particularly, because I have been fighting off some sort of nasty flu thing… still have a lingering cough, in fact, and it’s been more than two weeks!

    So that meant that while I was flat out in bed, I missed the official announcement about the talk I am giving at GDC China this weekend. It’s been years since I was in Shanghai, so I am looking forward to this!

    As far as what the talk is about… well, it’s sort of an extension of the lines of thought from the Project Horseshoe talk Influences and the GDC Online talk It’s All Games Now, and even a little bit from the Theory of Fun 10 Years Later talk. Basically, it’s about the patterns of thinking that games tend to encourage… and how these ways of thinking may be affecting us culturally. After all, if games do their work in large part via neuroplasticity, then that means that the cognitive habits we are picking up as gamers must be having an impact on how we think about, well, everything.

    What might those cognitive habits be? And what impact might that have?

    It’s a keynote, and supposed to be “inspirational,” so it’s in a lot of ways a rather light treatment of the subject… but I think there’s a lot to dig into there, and not all of it is unalloyed good… instead, it will be a picture of trade-offs. For example, just recently I read an article on how the neural pathways for empathy and the neural pathways of logical thinking seem to be mutually exclusive; you can’t do both at the same time. You have to emotionally detach yourself to be able to do true systems analysis, but if you are conditioned to approach the world analytically, does this mean that you are conditioned to avoid empathy? Pure speculation, and of course the answer will not be clear-cut.

    Anyway, here’s the details on the talk:

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  • GDCOnline: UO Classic Game Postmortem

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Well, we basically winged it, but it was a blast. We told stories, mostly out of order; fessed up to bad code and goofy decisions and being painfully young; and lamented the loss of that sens of crazy freedom.

    Luckily, Gamasutra has you covered if you weren’t in the full house.

    In the alpha, the team had wolves that chased rabbits across the map as part of its emergent gameplay system.

    In those early days, the rabbits would actually level up if they got into a fight with a wolf and managed to escape.

    “People would wander off in the alpha and try to kill a rabbit, and pretty soon they were playing Monty Python: The MMO,” joked Koster.

    The game was tweaked to disallow this, though Koster confesses that they left one monster rabbit in the world when the final game shipped.

    I wore my original UO shirt… and forgot to point it out! Doh!

    Basically, during the period when we were skunkworks and ignored by the company (it was mutual, we ignored them back) we did our own marketing. So that meant we made our own t-shirts with a made-up logo. And I still have that shirt, in surprisingly good shape for being from 1996. All credit to Clay Hoffman for making it, way back when…

     

     

  • GDCOnline: Online Game Legend

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

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    Last night i was given the Online Game Legend Award at the GDC Choice Online awards show. Rich Vogel gave a touching introduction. I think he was more nervous than I was!

    This is a reasonable facsimile of the little acceptance speech I gave. The real thing was filmed and is up on twitch.tv or Gamespot somewhere… edit: Oh, here: http://www.twitch.tv/gamespot/b/335135808

    I don’t feel like I deserve this, but i am happy to pretend that I do!

    I want to thank all of those people whose credit I am taking, many of whom are here tonight. You know who you are. It’s 16 years worth of names and I can’t possibly say them all.

    I do want to say some things that I have learned.

    First, don’t make my mistakes. I’ve made many. You’ve played them. Make new ones.

    Listen and learn, especially from your players.

    Share it all back.

    Don’t settle. Dare, instead.

    Love what you do.

    But a hard-won lesson here: Love your family more. Spend time with them too.

    My mom asked me to say this: soy Latino. Most people don’t seem to know… So it can be done.

    In theory I have more career years ahead of me than behind. I guess I’m going to have to come up with something new!

    Thank you.

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