game grammar

OGDA meeting
September 17, 2012September 16, 2012 Game talk
6 Comments
On Saturday I met with the Omaha Game Developers Association in a Google Hangout for a couple of hours of interview-style questions. The whole thing was streamed live on YouTube and also captured afterwards, so here it is for those who have the patience.

Among the things we talked about:
- how I got into games
- text muds
- early UO history
- use of metrics in SWG
- formal design tools and game grammar
- empathizing-systemizing theory (and related tests)
- ludonarrative dissonance (hat tip to Clint Hocking)
And way more… vid after the break.

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The best game design articles on the site
March 15, 2012August 29, 2012 Game talk, Gamemaking, Misc, Open thread
17 Comments
This is post #2,342 on this blog (not counting the dozens of articles, snippets, and presentations not in the blog database)… yet more of the over a quarter-million words written here since the site started in 1997 and the blog in 1998. And I have to admit, I tend to take for granted the idea that people have read all the stuff that matters, so they understand me when I throw around terms or assume that they know what my past writing on the topic is. Which is ludicrous, of course.

So I got asked on Twitter for a list of my juiciest game design posts, to serve as a central jumping-off point.

This was hard. But here’s a list of ones that I think are my best. Many of these are actually talks, rather than posts. These are usually in sort of rough reverse chronological order, but there’s plenty of places where they are just in the order I found them in, or random cut & paste order.

Feel free to list your own favorites in the comments. And if you haven’t seen some of these before, well, this is the best way to catch up on my overall beliefs and philosophies on games.

Theory of fun (cognition and games) and game grammar overview. This covers the very highest level structure of the thinking on these two interrelated subjects.
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Read More The best game design articles on the site
“X” isn’t a game!
March 13, 2012March 13, 2012 Game talk
74 Comments

I called this out as one of the trends I saw at GDC. Last year, people were saying that Farmville was not a game, and I argued that it was. This year, I wrote about narrative not being a mechanic and had to extend my comments on it because of the controversy, and Tadhg Kelly bluntly said “Dear Esther is not a game.” At GDC, the rant session featured Manveer Heir saying that it was arrogant and exclusionary not to consider it a game, and arguing that the boundaries of “game” needed to be large and porous. Immediately after, Frank Lantz gave his own rant, which used sports extensively as examples of games.

The definition of game that most people — and I am particularly thinking here of the layman’s use of the term — is basically something like “a form of play which has rules and a goal.” Lots of practitioners and academics have tried pinning it down further. I’ve offered up my own in the past:

Playing a game is the act of solving statistically varied challenge situations presented by an opponent who may or may not be algorithmic within a framework that is a defined systemic model.

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Awesome paper on games math
January 27, 2012 Game talk
10 Comments

Giovanni Viglietta of the University of Pisa has posted up a paper called “Gaming is a hard job, but someone has to do it!”.

In it, he not only analyzes a variety games to determine their complexity class, but he also arrives at a few metatheorems that are generically applicable for all game design. In other words, “include these features and your game gains fun.”

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Narrative isn’t usually content either
January 26, 2012January 26, 2012 Game talk, Gamemaking
43 Comments

When I said that narrative was not a game mechanic, but rather a form of feedback, I was getting at the core point that chunks of story are generally doled out as a reward for accomplishing a particular task. And games fundamentally, are about completing tasks — reaching for goals, be they self-imposed (as in all the forms of free-form play or paideia, as Caillois put it in Man, Play and Games) or authorially imposed (or ludus). They are about problem-solving in the sense that hey are about cognitively mastering models of varying complexity.

Some replies used the word “content” to describe the role that narrative plays. But I wouldn’t use the word content to describe varying feedback.

In other words, perverse as it may sound, I wouldn’t generally call chunks of story “game content.” But I would sometimes, and I’ll even offer up a game design here that does so.

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Read More Narrative isn’t usually content either

game grammar

OGDA meeting

The best game design articles on the site

“X” isn’t a game!

Awesome paper on games math

Narrative isn’t usually content either

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