Ludokultur

Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.

Christian Schmidt: Stay Forever (Folge 73)

• “Wenn man älter wird […] denkt man mehr und mehr an das eigene Werk. Unser Podcast, Stay Forever, ist für uns ein Werk. […] Aber vor allen Dingen verstehen wir die Spiele, über die wir sprechen, als Werk. Wir verstehen sie […] als wertvolle, besprechenswerte Dinge, die in einen Kontext einzuordnen sind. […] Lasst euch von niemandem da draußen einreden, dass Spielen Zeitverschwendung wäre. Unser Rat an euch wäre, dass ihr euer Spielen auch als Werk begreift und überlegt […] was ihr vielleicht zu eurem Werk über Spiele machen könnt.”

Jan Heinemann: Das “authentischste” Historienspiel aller Zeiten?! Die gewaltige Schräglage von “Kingdom Come: Deliverance”

• “Ich kann bei diesem Authentizitäts-Taumel nur den Kopf schütteln. Vor allem, weil er in der Regel fernab aller geschichtswissenschaftlichen Forschungsergebnisse oder -diskussionen verläuft, sondern sich stattdessen auf verbreitete Vorstellungen von Geschichte stützt, die als absolute Wahrheit gesetzt werden. Debatten um die Authentizität der Geschichtsdarstellung in digitalen Spielen, Filmen oder anderen Medien führen darum häufig unmittelbar zu energisch geführten Identitätsdebatten.”

Mark Brown: How Games Use Feedback Loops

• “If positive feedback loops work to compound changes in the game state, negative feedback loops strive to always counteract those changes and keep things in equilibrium. […] Positive loops help push a game to its conclusion […] and negative feedback loops […] create an interesting ebb and flow of comebacks and turnarounds, which leads to good drama. But both need to be balanced carefully.”

Mark Brown: How Snake Pass Works

• “If you do something bold, not everyone is going to love your game. […] That’s the prize you’ll pay for trying something bold, but I think it’s worth it. Original games like Snake Pass keep the hobby fresh and exciting, and give us something truly new to play with.”

Rowan Kaiser: The year single-player games became chores

• “The trend in 2017 isn’t that single-player games are dying. It’s that instead of being a week’s worth of fun, they’ve become a month’s worth of chores.”

Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.

Christian Schiffer: Wie das Spiel Wolfenstein 2 die deutsche Geschichte entsorgt

• “Ausgerechnet in der deutschen Version entsorgt Wolfenstein 2 die Verbrechen der Nationalsozialisten aufs Akkurateste und marginalisiert alles Jüdische. […] Wie kann ein eigentlich antifaschistischen Spiel, ausgerechnet in der deutschen Version zu einem feuchten Traum für Geschichtsrevisionisten mutieren?”

Dominik Abé & Johannes Roth: Postmortem: Shadow Tactics

• “That’s a dilemma that many developers are facing: going all in and potentially laying off your team is horrible, but so is releasing an unfinished game, because you can never make up for a bad first impression.”

Josh Bycer: How RPG Design has Influenced Action Games

• “The use of progression-based systems in action games has been one of the biggest design trends of this decade. […] Unfortunately many designers and publishers use this as an excuse to ignore creating meaningful and interesting game systems.”

Josh Menke: Skill, Matchmaking, and Ranking Systems Design

• “If you’re going to go skill, go all the way. Players who like skill-based systems will love it.”

Keith Burgun: Single Player Competition

• “I want to create deep, strong single-player strategy games that are as inclusive as possible, as non-toxic as possible, while being as easy as possible for videogame players to hook onto and understand.”

Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.

Charlie Cade: Challenge is the Core of Video Games

• “As a new fresh medium we can make up our own rules. We can a look at the type of art we’re making and decide what gives it its intrinsic value. […] Shouldn’t you entice new people with what the medium can do differently, rather than by trying to make it more like everything else?”

John Bain: I will now talk about Lootboxes and Gambling for just over 40 minutes

• “If you actually think that gaming companies were not fully aware […] that they could hook players in more with an unpredictable reward system versus a predictable one, then you might be a little naive.”

Mark Brown: How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves

• “Many [players] will simply gravitate towards strategies that will most likey lead to success, regardless of how enjoyable those strategies might actually be. […] But the awesome thing about design is that the game’s developers can tweak things to make sure players approach the game in the way they think would be most interesting.”

Vincent Toups: On the (pseudo?)-paradox of “fair” games.

• “When we say a game is fair, what we are saying is that the outcome isn’t random, but that it depends, sensitively, on which player makes the better sequence of moves in response to the other player.”

Wolfgang Walk: Spielertypen und Motivation, oder: Wie wir uns selbst in Ketten legen

• “Spiele, das sollten wir uns jeden Tag beim Aufstehen schon klar machen, stehen erst ganz am Anfang. Irgendein Kolumbus wird eines Tages und vielleicht schon sehr bald Amerika entdecken. Das Ziel muss sein, den ganzen Planeten Spiel zu erobern, sein ganzes Potenzial abzurufen, seinen ganzen Raum für die Menschen nutzbar zu machen.”

Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.

Albert van der Meer: Experimenting and being Allowed to Fail…a lot!

• “Society teaches us that failing is the worst possible outcome to anything. That single concept can literally paralyze people, perhaps you’ve had a moment where you didn’t even start something, simply for fear of failure. […] What a game does is promote a paradigm of experimentation, failure, repetition, and mastery when trying to accomplish a goal.”

Extra Credits: The Anchoring Effect

• “We’re very likely to use the first piece of data we get about something as a baseline, a guide which helps us to construct a mental model of how to reasonably view that thing.”

Jesper Juul: Playing

• “Play is broadly associated with free-form and voluntary activities, yet games are also defined by rule structures that in part limit what players can do. This juxtaposition contains the fundamental question of game playing: Is game playing a free activity, or is it determined and controlled by the game rules?”

Mitchell Nelson: Brain in a Jar 1: Two Systems

• “Though we have a kind of closely held morality about the purity and value of difficulty, it is a false religion. In fact, many games have an unintended, reverse difficulty problem where a beginner without levels, buffs and gear faces more difficult gameplay than a veteran, with a top tier build, no matter what your spread sheet says.”

Wolfgang Walk: Von der Coolness, Ausbeuter zu sein

• “Die Monetarisierung der Träume und Hoffnungen junger Menschen muss sich geil anfühlen, vor allem wenn man gleichzeitig noch von Millionen angehimmelt und dabei steinreich wird.”

Lesens-, hörens- und sehenswerte Fundstücke aus der Welt der Spiele.

Benjamin Cribb: How System Discovery Culture Progresses

• “Better understanding the common or competing structures of game design theories will help us to be more diligent in crafting these theories, and reduce confusion while debating them.”

Joost van Dongen: The requirements of good matchmaking

• “Because it’s usually impossible to achieve all matchmaking goals simultaneously, you need to think about how important each of them is. Especially waiting times suffer when you make other requirements more important.”

Keith Burgun: Clockwork Game Design Podcast Episode 41

• “Maybe there are […] formal, testable, true, absolute qualities of what is beautiful. […] And my work is mostly in how to make ‘better’ systems. […] However, […] I think that art also has another purpose of connecting. It’s saying: Hey, I see the world this way.”

Kevin Murphy: Does Inventory Management Ruin RPGs?

• “I find that in many RPGs I spend about half my time (or at least far too much of it) considering what to loot, reading item descriptions, going back and forth between different gun stat listing to weigh the pros and cons of changing my primary weapon, and generally not playing the game!”

Raph Koster: Consent Systems

• “To host a multiplayer virtual environment is to host and govern a space, and there are no shortage of models precisely because spaces are where we normally live.”