Ludokultur

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Activision: Matchmaking Series: The Role of Skill in Matchmaking

• “With deprioritized skill, returning player rate was down significantly for 90% of players. […] This is a concern for all players, including the top 10%, as if this pattern is allowed to continue, players will exit the game in increased numbers. Eventually a top 10% player will become a top 20% player, and eventually a top 30% player, until only the very best players remain playing the game. Those original top players will become increasingly likely to not return to the game. Ultimately, this will result in a worse experience for all players, as there will be fewer and fewer players available to play with.”

Jonas Tyroller: This Problem Changes Your Perspective On Game Dev

• “Design is a search algorithm. You’re searching for the best game possible. If you want to delight as many players as possible or maximize your revenue, then aim for fun, appeal and a reasonable scope. Fun is for keeping players, appeal is for gaining players, and scope is for making sure you can finish the game. Optimize your search, cause the success of your project depends on it.”

Rym DeCoster & Scott Rubin: Every Game is the Same Game

• “How often do you describe a new game as “X game crossed with Y game?” This is Dominion crossed with Chess. This is Quake crossed with Dance Dance Revolution. This is a Civilization-style game but with puzzle elements. If games are collections of mechanics, and genres are also essentially collections of mechanics, then we can dig deep into how games are described to find the deepest and most core patterns of game.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Josh Unsworth: The Triangle of Strategy

• “It is a bad idea to try to cater to all three styles of play equally – that way lies madness and a mediocre game – but thinking in terms of the experiences our players are seeking and what drives them through the game can help us to find the interesting areas to explore by adapting ideas and mechanics from other genres, while staying true to the essential experience of the game we are making.”

Soren Johnson: You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run a Sweatshop

• “Players don’t care about the imaginary game you have in your head. Indeed, players understand our games better than we do. When evaluating design talent, the most important trait I look for is humility. Designers need to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads at all times: to hold true to their design vision, even when success is uncertain; but also to always assume that their vision is meaningless until they see it in the hands of real players.”

Chris Kerr: Countering “lock and key” design with hostile immersive sim Mosa Lina

• “Crucially, Hollendonner says he wanted Mosa Lina to feel “completely intrinsic.” That’s why he chose to shun extrinsic motivators such as meta-progression systems or in-game rewards, and notes he spent years trying to create something “people want to play with, just because they want to play with it.” Mosa Lina, he says, was the first successful attempt.”

Tom Francis: Generating boring levels for fresh experiences in Heat Signature

• “Shuffle-friendly game design is making elements where all you have to do is re-arrange them and interesting stuff happens. Design tools, obstacles and filters with different effects, constraints and freedoms that relate closely to what gets shuffled when a level is generated. And then your levels can be boring trash, just like mine.”

Yahtzee Croshaw: The Difficulty Paradox

• “Modern game design, especially in AAA, seems to place a much greater emphasis on letting the player feel powerful and feel more powerful over time. […] But it is also true that the game needs to get proportionally harder if it wants to stay interesting. And there have been many big games lately that make me worry that the second part of that equation is being neglected.”