game grammar

  • Why Isn’t Money Points?

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading
    Comments 16 Comments

    Mint.com is a personal finance site that won the judges’ award at TechCrunch40 the same year that Metaplace won the audience award. It helps you do budgeting and other such dull tasks, all in slick interface.

    Despite the zillions of products out there to do this, we still managed to wheel, deal, and borrow ourselves into a financial crisis (that is still ongoing, though swine flu may be eclipsing it just now). Clearly, something was lacking in the appeal here, for if said product category were truly successful, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

    Now, Mint is in closed beta on a feature that turns personal finance into a game, complete with points earned for doing things like socking away some cash into the savings account each month, or switching to a credit card with annual rewards. Get enough points in a sustained way, and you too can be a Financial Guru.

    This seems like a fairly straightforward harnessing of game-style incentive systems towards a laudable goal (though I should note that said credit card with rewards is likely from one of Mint’s partners). But honestly — money is points anyway, isn’t it? Why is it that we value the cash less than the flat-screen TV?

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  • A Model of Play

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    A Model of Play is a fascinating poster (available as a PDF or as images) that takes what seems like a very game-grammar point of view on the concept of play — even freeform play.

    In play, one of the primary goals is to have fun — to continue engaging in the conversation that creates fun. Individuals choose the means for achieving that goal; they choose the topic of conversation, for example, which game to play. Within a topic, they choose different strategies and pursue a series of sub-goals, adjusting means according to their effectiveness. Goals and sub-goals and associated means form a tree (or web) of possibilities for action.

    Among the grammar principles that are mentioned is the notion that play always requires two, even if the second person is a “virtual person.” The notion that interactivity is inherently a conversation can be traced back to at least Chris Crawford, of course.

    Also cool is the “step by step” logic version found here, which builds the poster argument by argument.

  • Researchers work on procedural fun

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    Developing behaviors via genetic algorithms of various sorts has been around a long time now. You come up with a basic environment and ruleset, then you let loose millions of generations of simple AIs to keep trying to surivive. You then have the AIs tweak themselves based on what survived well, attempting to evolve the best survivor.

    This can be used for lots of purposes — and now it’s being applied to game design. Starting with a simple Pac-Man like environment, researchers are generating zillions of procedural games, and then testing to see which is most fun. But how to measure the fun?

    It should be pretty straightforward to see how game rules can be represented to be evolved: just encode them as e.g. an array of integers, and define some sensible mutation and possibly recombination operators. (In this particular case, we use a simple generational EA without crossover.) For other rule spaces, some rules might be more like parameters, and could be represented as real numbers.

    What’s the much trickier question is the fitness function. How do you evaluate the fitness of a particular set of game rules? …

    Our solution is to use learnability as a predictor of fun. A good game is one that is not winnable by a novice player, but which the player can learn to play better and better over time, and eventually win; it has a smooth learning curve.

    via Togelius: Automatic Game Design.

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  • Reflections Across the Board: The “Music” of Game Design: Part 1

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Here’s a cool, very game-grammary approach to board game design that is inspired, as my initial game notation work was to some degree, by music.

    What I arrived at was a series of “discoveries” or “conclusions” about specific models of game design that I assert can help one in the process of identifying not only problems in a game design but also what may be lacking or not present yet that could help a game reach the next level. As I arrived at these conclusions, I found that they felt very much like many of the typical principles of composition that I encountered while studying music.

    via Reflections Across the Board: The “Music” of Game Design: Part 1.

    The bulk of the article ends up examining a particular “atom” called the “Tri-Level Resource Exchange Model.” Atoms like these are usually termed “design patterns” in software. The article lands at identifying the number 5 as apparently very important in this model; I don’t think it is coincidence that it fits nicely in the famous 7 +/2 range.