game design

  • Lessons Learned, and gaming folks using web ways

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    Lessons Learned is a really good blog that gives a lot of insight into exactly all the sorts of things that I was referencing in that AGDC panel on how we have to adapt to web ways of doing things. Be sure to read through the archives.

    I commented on that panel that the notion of doing things like A/B split testing is sort of foreign to game developers. But it’s something incredibly powerful when correctly applied. But it’s a little hard to conceive of saying “the combat rules are different from fight to fight.” The commonest form of game A/B testing is alternate rule shards, which is a huge investment and is far too large and game-adjusting an approach to really be used as a split testing factor.

    It’d be worth pondering what sorts of split testing could be fruitfully brought into the game world, given how useful a tool it is. Of course, part of the barrier for game teams in the large-scale MMO world is that clients are updated via patches, not streaming, and there is no good mechanism typically for patching only half the clients, or some such. But imagine having taken the original SWG UI icons and the more colorful NGE revamp, and upgrading only half the users — and then seeing whether the control or the new design have better metrics.

    There’s a level of commitment that we feel when making game changes that we should try to avoid. After all, successful game design in the early stages of prototyping and platytesting involves killing lots of sacred cows, often making big shifts in how things are played. But we tend to see patches as a case where “it’s a big deal if we have to revert.” Part of the web way is acknolwedging the frequency of mistaken hypotheses.

  • A Theory of Fun is available again on Amazon

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
    Comments 13 Comments

    This is a nice blog anniversary surprise!

    I don’t know for how long, or why (maybe the publisher stuff is sorted out? Maybe someone found a cache of them hidden under a mossy rock north of Pirate Cove) — but it’s claims 1-3 weeks shipping time, and it’s $17.24, and it’s not used copies. As you may or may not know, it’s been out of print since last October or so, and copies have been going for as high as $300.

    If you’ve been waiting, now might be the time to order it!

    Theory of Fun for Game Design @ Amazon

    BTW, if any current owners want to review it, it could use some fresh reviews…

  • Red 5’s chasing the persistence dream

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 89 Comments

    Once upon a time, there was an acronym we used for certain sorts of virtual worlds. We called them PSW’s, for “persistent state world.”

    Most virtual worlds today don’t actually have persistent state. Oh, your characters do, but not the world. In fact, the ability to affect the world has fallen dramatically since the days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online. M59 featured shifting political balance, and UO had full world state persistence. If someone killed Bob the baker, he was gone. If you dropped something on the ground, it stayed there until it rusted away (or more likely, someone came along and grabbed it — and that someone was just as likely to be a monster as it was a player).

    It took half an hour to 45 minutes to save all of the world state in UO, by the way. Which meant rollbacks to your character if the server crashed. 🙂

    Read More “Red 5’s chasing the persistence dream”

  • Rohrer article: Testing the Limits of Single-Player

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    Testing the Limits of Single-Player is a cool article by Jason Rohrer which messes around specifically with the game grammatical notion of the “opponent” — basically, questioning the boundaries of single-player games, and how deep they can be, compared to multiplayer games. It’s interesting because it not only explores it from a design theory point of view, but then goes on to offer up a game prototype exploring the issues. Very cool.

  • A game designer’s core skills

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 39 Comments

    The two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer (IMHO):

    • Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything — the bare rules, bare mechanics, bare actions, stats, feedback loops. The skeleton, the core, the bone and sinew of it, without any dressing, as a shifting, moving mechanical construct of guy wires and rigid struts. It’s not an attack, it’s force projection, it’s territory control in a graph. And you can see it in your head, and when a feature gets proposed, you can see where it slots in — or not, and know whether the whole construct will tip over.
    • Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play — to approach it as a user experience, the magical moment of immersion, the confusion, the dazzle and colors, the sheer sense of possibility and play. The skin, the surface, the way the music will swell when you step through that door, the way that moving will FEEL, the way the possibilities unfold. To know where someone would be confused, to know where they will be led, to see the whole construct as an innocent.

    And a great designer? They should be able to see both in their head at once.