Ludokultur

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

Brandon Rym DeCoster & Scott Rubin: Quitting

• “Games are not real life. […] If you can’t quit them they’re not games. If you design games, you have to at least consider the idea that someone might quit your game in the middle of it. And you have to decide how you want that experience to play out for all involved.”

Christopher Gile: XCOM 2 and Vision: The Cost of an Illusion

• “Deep systemic flaws in design usually don’t present in expected ways and before we can start talking about solutions we have to be able to properly diagnose the problem.”

Daniel Cook: Game design patterns for building friendships

• “[Games] operate on the same scale as sports, religions and governments. Such engineered human processes can help players thrive in designed virtual spaces and ultimately in their real lives.”

Frank Lantz et al.: Depth in Strategic Games

• “A game with great depth is one that seems to unfold into an endless series of challenging problems and responds to serious thought by continually revealing surprising and interesting things to think about.”

Jochen Gebauer: Glücksspiele und Kriegsverbrecher

• “Ich habe einen Vorschlag: Wie wäre es, wenn wir eine altbekannte Frage einmal unter einem völlig anderen Blickwinkel betrachten. Sie lautet: Warum handeln Spieler scheinbar ständig gegen ihre eigenen Interessen?”

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

Christian Neffe: Kritik: “Assassin’s Creed”

• “Videospielverfilmung des Macbeth-Regisseurs, die weder visuell noch inhaltlich zu überzeugen weiß. Stattdessen: Eine Herausforderung für die Augen, die in philosophischem Nonsens ertränkt wird.”

Extra Credits: Strategic Uncertainty

• “It’s a really tough task to balance a well-honed system which you can plan and strategize around, while having uncertainties that make that system always feel fresh.”

Jamie Madigan & Scott Rigby: Self Determination Theory and Why We Play Games

• “You can motivate yourself just fine. What I want to do is create an environment that facilitates you being able to satisfy those needs. When that happens, you value those experiences.”

Matthew Dunstan: The Crossover: Goals in Games

• “Most games will use a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic goals, and that exact mix and how it is chosen is an important parameter a designer can tweak to gain a desired player experience.”

Steven Hutton: Why are MOBAs so toxic?

• “Once you start losing, things can snowball on you very easily and while comebacks do happen the set up of the game makes them inherently difficult to pull off.”

Jenseits des Tellerrands

Evan Puschak: How Louis CK Tells A Joke

• “There are 207 words in this joke and not a single one is wasted. […] Great standup comedy is language distilled to its most potent form.”

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

Charlie Cade: When To Use Actor Faces in Video Games

• “There’s also that nagging feeling […] of trying to legitimize the medium by shoehorning stars from a more established one into ours, which I can’t believe we haven’t grown out of yet.”

Katharine Neil: How We Design Games and Why

• “It is time we returned to this unanswered question of formal, abstract design tools for game design. Until we have the tools to design with our minds and not just with our hands, we are limiting ourselves creatively. In games, these limits include having our creative process held hostage by the oftentimes alienating and frantic churn of the production and testing cycle.”

Keith Burgun: Clockwork Criteria: Guidelines for Ideal Strategy Game Design

• “There are certainly practical reasons why you might not want a specific game to be a Clockwork game. But to the extent that you want your strategy game to be elegant, you should adopt as many of these principles as possible.”

Samuel Ratchkramer: “How Hard?” More Like “Hard How?”

• “When the controls occupy less of a player’s headspace, there’s more room for considering a system, the game proper. While the potential is there, designers need to be careful to not squander it by taking all those old shortcuts.”

Soren Johnson: Donald Trump Won Because Of Bad Game Design

• “Although rules are written to favor certain outcomes, they must be judged not just by what they fix in the best-case (shortening the primaries) but also by what they enable in the worst-case (Donald Trump).”

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

Curtiss Murphy: What Makes Great Games Great?

• “Stick to your core. […] Less is, in fact, more.”

Daniel Cook: Autumn of Indie Game Markets

• “Games are looking nicer than ever, don’t they? That quality bar keeps creeping higher. With so much work to do, your team is a bit larger. And with so many mouths to feed, it feels riskier to lose everything experimenting on wacky new game mechanics.”

Josh Bycer: Feeling the Frustration of “Fun Pain” Game Design

• “You need to decide where you want your money to come from: Short-term fun pain/heavily monetized elements, or a long-term plan with a dedicated fan-base.”

Maria Garda & Paweł Grabarczyk: Is Every Indie Game Independent?

• “We claim that, despite the etymology, the term indie is not just an abbreviation of the term independent.”

Wolfgang Walk: Der Mythos vom “story-driven game”

• “Der Begriff ‘story-driven game’ meint entweder irgendeinen hanebüchenen Marketing-Unfug – oder er bedeutet etwas, das per definitionem eine der zentralen Eigenschaften eines Games beschädigt und versklavt. […] Man kann ein Game mit der Story genauso gut antreiben wie einen Automotor, indem man an den Rädern dreht!”

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

Brandon Rym DeCoster & Scott Rubin: The Grind

• “You only get one life to live and you’re going to spend it pressing A – attack, attack, attack – just so you can see the next video in a Final Fantasy game that you could have watched on YouTube. […] Think of your whole life when you’re doing this.”

Jordan Georgiev: Going Too Big – Simplicity in Indie Games

• “The more time you spend creating a fluid, satisfying and replayable core experience – the better game you will have. […] So we should spend our time designing the elements our players will spend the most time playing – the main mechanics and the main loops of the game.”

Keith Burgun: Minimize calculation (in games worth playing)

• “The point is, you do need some degree of determinism in games; some “causal line” that goes from the player’s input and stretches out into the system to some extent. But by using input randomness smartly and carefully selecting the position of the information horizon, you can (and should) reduce the calculate-able (solvable) parts of your game down to a reasonable level.”

Maciej Biedrzycki: Why is selling good games so hard?

• “Think about No Man’s Sky. They sold millions of copies even though the game was universally criticized by both gamers and the press once it was out. So, if it’s financially better to overpromise and under-deliver, one has to wonder where our industry is heading.”

Richard Garfield: A Game Player’s Manifesto

• “I believe it is time to send a message to game designers and publishers. As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.”

Jenseits des Tellerrands

Evan Puschak: Breaking Bad – An Episode Of Reactions

• “What makes drama work, what makes it interesting, isn’t climactic action scenes, or the bombastic declaration of colorful characters, or even big ideas. It’s the succession of reactions that cascade off of every choice.”