game design

  • Great design analysis of Angry Birds

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments

    This just got passed around the office: a UX design analysis of Angry Birds, touching on mental models of mechanics, feedback response times, short-term memory management, the importance of mystery (almost exactly equivalent to what I called “delight” in my book), the audio design, and the visuals and branding.

    It’s like a little master-class wrapped up into a blog post, and a potent reminder that designers in other fields are perfectly capable of doing much of what we do — indeed, are often more expert in some areas. It behooves game designers to go learn the lessons outsiders can teach us.

    In most commercial software interfaces, response time management is completely overlooked even by those who claim to be UI design experts. The developers of Angry Birds managed response time in a way that goes far beyond simply “faster is better”.

    For example, in Angry Birds, it was possible for the programmers to have made the flight of the birds fast – very fast, but they didn’t. Instead they programmed the flight of the angry flock to be leisure pace as they arc across the sky heading for the pigs’ glass houses. This slowed response time, combined with a carefully crafted trajectory trace (the flight path of the bird), solves one huge problem for all user interfaces – error correction. The vast majority of software user interfaces have no consideration for how users can be taught by experience with the system to improve their performance. This problem is a vast and complex issue for screen-based trading systems where error correction is not only essential, but also career threatening.

    via Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience.

  • Press from Social Mechanics talk

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments

    Funny how all the commentary has moved to Twitter and is no longer found on blogs these days! 🙂  But here’s a few anyway [Edit: I keep adding them as I find them..]:

     

     

     

  • Speaking at #gdc11: Social Mechanics, again

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    I am doing a revised, streamlined version of my Austin GDC talk on Social Mechanics, this time sprinkled through with more references specifically to social games. It’ll be at the Social and Online Gaming Summit, Monday at 3pm.  Here is the event listing:

    Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design]Speaker/s: Raph Koster (Playdom)
    Day / Time / Location: Monday 3:00- 4:00 Room 134, North Hall
    Track / Format: Social & Online Games Summit / Lecture
    Description: Many have accused social games of not really being social. But they are underpinned by many classic social mechanics that drive interaction and community-building. Some of these have been proven to work in other genres such as MMOs and are beginning to filter into the social games market; others are easily visible and quite familiar in real life, but have yet to be seen in the design of social games. In this talk we will draw from both proven game design and from anthropology and sociology and explore the social potential of social games.
    Takeaway: Learn about core human psychology driving social games, and walk away with a clear list of game mechanics that encourage social structures and human relationships, thereby driving retention.
    Eligible Passes:Summits and Tutorials Pass, All Access Pass

    I will endeavor not to take an hour and 15 minutes this time. 🙂

  • Designing for community

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 44 Comments

    Yeah, yeah, I’m writing about this again. 🙂

    Tobold’s got a post on community in MMORPGs.

    We can’t get to a really better community, where all the goodwill is felt from the bottom of the heart, without the players themselves contributing to that. I still remember my first day in Everquest, where a complete stranger helped me and even gave me a magic necklace, for no gain to himself. It is hard to blame developers for the fact that such behavior has become so rare.

    Designers design the social environment by commission or omission. If they ignore it altogether, then there will be an accidental mishmash of features and the result is fairly unpredictable.  Mind you, this doesn’t mean that paying close attention to it is going to work well either. Players respond to the environment they are given.

    Read More “Designing for community”