game design

  • GDC10: Sporadic Play

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    Liveblog of talk on Sporadic Play, Bryan Cash & Jeremy Gibson

    Sporadic play describes a game where mechanics intentionally limit how often a player interacts with a persistent game world. We’ll talk about history with it, why it is a good thing, design concepts, and a bit about the future.

    HISTORY… IN REVERSE

    Most obvious place to start — Facebook. Look at the top 20 games here. Farmville is #1 and uses sporadic play. Mafia Wars, Petville, YoVille, 16 of the top 20 are sporadic play games. If you add up the MAU, you get 332m people, which is kinda BS, but just in the top 20.

    It has also been around in console and traditional PC games. Animal Crossing, a game where as time went on in real life, events like Christmas happened in the game too. Seasons, real time, limiting what you can do based on the real time of the real. Another one was Kingdom of Loathing in 2002, a web game, limited number of things you can do based on action points.

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  • Don’t Display Negative Karma

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    Randy Farmer (he of Habitat fame, and much more besides!) and Bryce Glass have been posting excerpts from their upcoming book Building Web Reputation Systems on a blog, and today’s has a great anecdote in it that hammers home all the math behind negative reputation systems.

    “Hi! I see from your hub that you’re new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house.”

    “What are you talking about?”

    “I’m a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I’m kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don’t worry, we’ll turn it green when you pay…”

    If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn’t worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn’t usually involve gangsters.

    — Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog: The Dollhouse Mafia, or “Don’t Display Negative Karma”.

    There’s whole rough drafts of chapters on the site — totally worth reading, pondering, absorbing, and using.

  • GDCA: Schubert on The Loner

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    Gamespot has a writeup, and Damion has posted his slides. I missed the talk, but it sounds like it was a good one!

    “The irony of being alone in an MMO is inescapable. Being a loner is OK, but feeling lonely is not.”–Schubert, on why even solo players care about a well-populated world.

    via Old Republic dev discusses massively multiplayer loners – News at GameSpot.

    Slides are here (in PPTX format).

  • GDCA: Greg Costikyan’s talk on randomness

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    Randomness has been part of games since their earliest inception — and when I say “earliest inception,” I mean deep into the unwritten Neolithic past. Game scholars sometimes point to The Royal Game of Ur as the earliest known game, and in a sense it is — but we also know of games from any number of Neolithic cultures that survived into the modern era, many of them documented by Stewart Cullin in a series of books for the Smithsonian, published in the early 20th century.

    — Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture.

    Go read, it is awesome.

  • A really old game design essay

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Cory Doctorow’s next book has all sorts of interesting editions, including one with endpapers made from ephemera from friends of his. I went looking for papers to send him. Flipping through old notebooks and scratch pads, I found a 2000 word essay-cum-manifesto-cum-tirade that I do not recall writing. It’s fiery and jejune and I can tell I was in my early twenties.

    So I am sending the five pages of legal pad, scribbled frantically and passionately on both sides. I barely remember being the guy who wrote it, at a time before the World of Warcraft mentions on TV and the casual games on the web, at a time when it seemed like the corporations were already plenty big, back when “designer” was not even a title you saw, or if it was seen it was not accorded much respect. I don’t even know if it was written for an audience or not. At times it seems to speak to listeners, and at times it sounds like I was talking to myself.

    I’m also posting it here, not because I agree with everything that I thought all those years ago, and not because it’s deathless insight deserving of being brought into the light. No, I post it because I just turned 38 on Monday, and it seemed worth remembering that passion; because even though many of the problems the essay discussed have changed, and times have moved on, there are always plenty of folks who are in their early twenties themselves and are railing away, and maybe they could use the fiery jejune kindred spirit of the past to keep them company.

    “The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”

    — Eugene Jarvis

    Game design is an art and a craft. From the craft aspect of it we know that it involves predictable patterns, specific elements and tools that are common; in a word, we learn that it is to an extent quantifiable. It is not alchemical and mysterious. It obeys principles which may or may not be articulated or understood by its practitioners.

    It is also an art – and there are no arts that are not also crafts. That means that it also strives to bottle lightning, to capture Lorca’s duende; it strives to shatter barriers and to communicate, provide venues of discussion and new contexts, enlighten, or even merely entertain. It must innovate (even if only in the creators’ eyes) or it is not worthy of the name.

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