• Playtesting versus science

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    …there isn’t much resembling a science for designing the abstract game features, or at least not one that is well-known and accepted. Even some of the better-known designers such as Daniel Cook and Raph Koster seem to consider their work to be more about casting an enlightened eye over trial-and-error, relying on play-testers to tell them what is fun. While nobody would seriously argue that you don’t need some sort of play-testing – just like graphics programming requires the programmer to actually look at what is being rendered – it seems a bit defeatist to assume that it’s not theoretically possible for a knowledgeable enough designer to be able to create a compelling game experience without needing to have others try it first.

    via The importance of abstraction « Tales from the Ebony Fortress.

    I’ve certainly made games that were fun right off the bat. It’s an exhilarating experience when it happens — though arguably, I played them in my head before playing them in code or on paper, in my first prototype. But I have definitely gotten prototypes to fun before showing them to other people. In fact, I generally don’t show them to other people until I get them to some semblance of fun.

    So sure, it’s possible, and we don’t need to be defeatist about it.

    What I have never done is gotten them to be as fun as they can be without someone else’s eyes on them.

    I suspect this isn’t any different from any other creative medium; writers need editors, theater needs rehearsals, etc. Workshopping and dry runs are classic tools used in the arts for centuries, regardless of how much we manage to turn art from craft into science.

  • Blog posts I didn’t write lately

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    I have been very lazy about blogging lately. So I thought I would share the posts you’re not going to see.

    • Speculation on whether a game can effectively portray the umwelt of another species given the double mediation of digital gaming and the human senses.
    • Thoughts on whether the mini-furors over each elimination of popular contestants on American Idol are revealing of the nature of voting bloc systems, and whether there is any difference between political parties and VoteForTheWorst.com.
    • A response to Tadhg Kelly’s commentary on my GDC talk.
    • A response to Dan Cook’s controversial piece on game criticism; as someone both mentioned in the article’s original draft as a role model, and someone who has written plenty of “soft” non-mechanics-driven criticism of games (here, here, here, here and more), I don’t really agree with where he landed.
    • Musings on collaboration, overcollaboration, and vision-holding, also driven by a tweet of Dan’s.
    • Stuff that turned into tweets instead: social games killing soap operas, and what that and GagaVille mean; the notion that cognitive science could figure out the precise neurochemical triggers present in stories and publicize them, resulting in all books being written to maximize market share based on hitting specific buttons
    • The process of adding and tuning feedback to a game in order to better the experience
    • Rough thoughts on the architecture of a Singularity operating system, and what the implications of full brain simulation are on the then-simulated mass media

    Sorry! Maybe I’ll get to these someday. 🙂

  • More genocidal Tetris

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 9 Comments

    A screenshot of FojbaOne of the most commonly repeated or recited snippets from Theory of Fun for Game Design is the notion of dressing substantially changing a game experience, using the example of a Tetris clone reskinned to mimic a gas chamber.

    Let’s picture a game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent Jews down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young ones, fat ones and tall ones. As they fall to the bottom, they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well. Should they manage to get out, the game is over and you lose. But if you pack them in tightly enough, the ones on the bottom succumb to the gas and die.

    I do not want to play this game. Do you? Yet it is Tetris. You could have well-proven, stellar game design mechanics applied towards a quite repugnant premise.

    Folks who have been reading the blog for a while may also recall that a team in Brazil actually built such a Tetris, called Calabouço Tétrico. I blogged about it here.

    Today, I stumbled across this little gem of an article relating a similar story I had never heard. It’s in Italian (Google translation here), but the gist of it is that a Slovenian website called Mladina  made an editorial game about Tito partisans and the pro-Nazi Slovene Home Guard, back in 2000.

    Apparently this game caught the notice of the Italian parliament and was censored! You can play it here anyway.

    And now, EastPak uses the same concept for an ad. 🙂

  • Avatar rights come back

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 38 Comments

    The Lawbringer: A prelude to avatar rights is an article kicking off what appears to be a series looking at avatar rights in the context of World of Warcraft. It has been a while since the original article on avatar rights has been commented on much on the web, though it still regularly gets discussed in books on Internet law. Very few worlds ever adopted any variant of this as a terms of service, and Metaplace doing so back when we ran a customer-facing service had no real impact other than garnering some publicity.

    Oddly enough, the article has been much on my mind lately, mostly because of how it closes, with a prediction that avatar service providers will both hold immense quantities of personal information but also dominate the market, making it hard to use an alternate provider:

    Someday there won’t be any admins. Someday it’s gonna be your bank records and your grocery shopping and your credit report and yes, your virtual homepage with data that exists nowhere else…  it may be a little harder to write to Customer Service. Your avatar profile might be your credit record and your resume and your academic transcript, as well as your XP earned.

    On the day that happens, I bet we’ll all wish we had a few more rights in the face of a very large, distributed server, anarchic, virtual world where it might be very very hard to move to a different service provider…

    …It’s a hypothetical exercise.

    For now.

    — “Declaring the Rights of Players”, 2000

    Not very long ago my daughter was banned from Facebook. She has no idea why; neither do I. I would keep an eye on her page, and there was nothing untoward on it that I saw. She hadn’t been using it actively, and it took her several days to notice it was gone. And she’s just not interested in it enough to bother setting up a new one.

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  • The Sunday Song: April Snails

    Hours Categories Music

    We moved to a new house. There is a huge backyard, with fruit trees. And there are many snails.

    This is the first thing I have recorded in quite a while, and the first in the new house’s music room.

    It’s pretty rough. I just wrote it, and haven’t learned to play it very smoothly yet, and I didn’t even try to mix it right, so it clips in places.

    – download April Snails.mp3

    Open D tuning, on the 1962 Gibson acoustic.