Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.
Alex Jaffe: Cursed Problems in Game Design
- “A cursed problem is an unsolvable design problem, rooted in a conflict between core player promises. […] Cursed problems cannot just be solved. They require sacrifice. You have to give something up.”
Alex Schwartz, Ziba Scott: 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality
- “We were looking through the App Store and realizing how scummy and gross some parts of it can really be. There’s clones everywhere, garbage reskins, low-effort shovelware. […] We thought: How do we do gross better?”
Andrew Przybylski: When the Fun Stops: The Science of Addiction
- “I think, best case scenario, this party is going to go on for about five more years. […] There is a level of understanding that the public and policy makers have. They can intuit a whole bunch of stuff about gaming addiction. […] But as [they] get closer to the iceberg, they’re going to be able to see all the other stuff.”
Anthony Giovannetti: ‘Slay the Spire’: Metrics Driven Design and Balance
- “Without change and experimentation you aren’t going to narrow in on the good stuff. Don’t be afraid to make changes. In the worst case you’re only going to get more information to act on later, and ultimately change is just going to help you.”
Jason Rohrer: 2014 vs. 2018: The Shape of Financial Success Before and After the Indiepocalypse
- “One [type of game] which I think has become extremely risky […] is the consumable game. And far less risky are what I’m calling infinite unique situation generators.”
Lars Doucet: Wash your game’s windows
- “Ever played one of those games where you have no clue what any of the mechanics actually do and you just kind of muddle through? Playing this kind of game is like peering through a dirty, smudged window. […] So go ahead. Put some Windex on it.”
Mark Brown: Why Synergies are the Secret to Slay the Spire’s Fun
- “Synergies make you feel smart. […] You weren’t simply given the tools to be powerful, you found them. You noticed some link between two cards and put them together in your deck. […] On the surface these cards seem very simple and easy to use, perfect for new players. But these cards also hide untold complexity that is only seen by advanced players, because the only way to really get the most out of them is to use them in combination with other cards.”
Matthew Davis: ‘Into the Breach’ Design Postmortem
- “We needed to follow those natural design constraints. We needed to see what the game was imposing on us, instead of us trying to impose nonsense on the game. […] Letting the combat thrive and find its place and really dominate the play experience is fine. Letting the strategy layer just get out of its way, doing its necessary job of mostly not annoying you is all it needed to do.”
Rich Wilson: ‘Mooncrash’: Resetting the Immersive Simulation
- “Roguelikes generally rely heavily on a player’s internalization of systems. They don’t rely on rote memorization and they generally allow for expressive players and emergent situations. A lot of those core values speak to what we do in immersive sims as well, so there was a lot of overlap there.”
Tom Francis: Design Talk
- “Having a language to talk about stuff helps you think about it more clearly and helps you advance your thinking beyond basic things and just be better in your reasoning. […] Design thinking, design reasoning is kind of your compass or flashlight, something that is pointing you in a direction – it may well be wrong, but to not have a compass or a flashlight is way worse.”
Ludokultur 