Ludokultur

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.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Derek Yu: Indie Game Dev: Assessing Risk

• “In this article, I share a framework that you can use to help you evaluate the risk of a game concept and compare the riskiness of one idea to another. It’s one of the things I think about when I’m deciding what I want to work on next. Regardless of whether you want your next game to be a paradigm-shifting smash hit or you just want to make something you care about with some pieces of you in it, the goal of this framework is to try and make development feel a little more predictable.”

Jon Bailes: Objectively Good

• “Ragnarök exemplifies sound practice arguably better than any other game. And it’s a good game, objectively good, in that you’ll rarely find flaws in its precise logic. But in being so consistently good, it’s never great—its transparent, algorithmically precise efforts to sustain interest ironically create a tedious loop—and ultimately it comes to feel invasive and cynical. Ragnarök and games like it condition our desires until we come to expect sign-based experiences based on learned automatic responses. Just as Google Maps, road signs, and advertisements teach us to view cities as a string of commercial interests, they block transformative thought at the unconscious level.”

Josh Strife Hayes: What Went Wrong with Gaming?

• “Up until now the best way to make the most amount of money was to make the best game you possible could, because people would buy it and that was it. The transaction was finished. It was fair. The best way to make money on modern games is to make the best framework as a holder for these [abusive monetization] strategies. […] Modern design often puts the player into an awkward position where the game has spent more time focusing on the manipulative, abusive systems than it has on just being the best game it could be.”

Matthewmatosis: Extrinsic Motivation

• “It seems reasonable to assume that players can exert a certain amount of control over their intrinsic motivators. Therefore, in many cases players can simply invalidate extrinsic motivation. No matter how many tricks are deployed, games happen in your mind, including their punishments, rewards and everything else in between. To the extent that you can influence your own mind, you can also influence your experience with any games you choose to play.”

yakkocmn: The Manipulative Design of Roblox

• “For every decently crafted platformer or impressive Call of Duty remake, which also come loaded with their own in-app purchases, there is a massive ocean of pay-to-win PvP nightmares, pay-to-skip-the-grind MMOs and dopamine-obliterating idle games. […] As Roblox continues to expand its reach and implement new forms of ad space and monetization, while major companies like Cartoon Network and Sega create continue to create official experiences, the site’s legitimacy and guise of child friendliness only grows – despite its huge variety of unregulated games.”