Ludokultur

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Babbling Brook: The Unfortunate Truth about NFTs…

• “Microtransactions and gacha mechanics are one thing, but attempting to turn your player base, including children, into a literal workforce that will need to grind endlessly, scam one another, and cheat to earn back their investment, is completely unacceptable behaviour. You are simply making a mockery of an industry that so many people hold dear.”

Christopher Natsuume: Let me explain Blockchain gaming and Play-to-Earn. // Using NFTs to own ingame objects: Also pretty much a scam.

• “NFTs are a pure scam. Blockchain gaming is a pyramid scheme. And play-to-earn is not only a scam, it’s deeply immoral. […] At our brightest moments, games can be a wonderful, beautiful force for good. […] And what I’ve seen in the last two years is one of the most cynical, painful, destructive attacks on our industry that I have seen in decades of working in video games.”
• “We produce more revenue than any other entertainment industry in the world. And so we presented this enormous target to the crypro bros. […] And so they’ve created this ridiculous fantasy story of NFTs and cryptocurrencies somehow adding some kind of value to any of this, for the basic reason that they want you to go out and buy cryptocurrency.”

Dan Olson: The Problem With NFTs

• “If you pitch your game based on earning potential, you’re going to attract people seeking to industrialize your platform faster and in greater numbers than would otherwise play. This is exactly the parasitic situation that games for decades now have been actively minimizing, because it creates vicious negative externalities. If players can sell their in-game stuff, then it changes the way that they play the game. It changes the way that they optimize their playtime.”

Elizabeth M. Renieris: Amid the Hype over Web3, Informed Skepticism Is Critical

• “If Web 2.0 was predicated on selling our data, Web3 will have us sell ourselves as it doubles down on extractivism, turning every interaction into a commercial transaction. Without a critical perspective, familiar harms will not only be replicated; they will be exacerbated. […] Criticism is the hard work of accepting the reality of what is, understanding how and why it came about, and addressing the deeper issues and forces involved. It is the opposite of the “building” ethos of continually punting to new tech or the next thing, as if on a blank slate of human nature and culture.”

Jürgen “tante” Geuter: The legacy of NFTs

• “But getting these assets means you “earned”. As if you had another job. And while you probably never will be able to realize those gains, you can tell yourself and the people around you, that it totally makes sense to play more of the game you “invested” in. That you should play it even if it’s not fun. That you should spend more time on it. And potentially pay for another microtransaction. […] This is why so many people warn about NFTs and the Web3 stuff: The idea that everything should be a tradable asset is even more dangerous than the massive environmental cost of the whole blockchain space.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Derek Yu: One More Run: The Making of ‘Spelunky 2’

• “I think spiky games are often thought of as punishing, but to me the difficiulty, while it’s an important part of the design ethos, is in service of the goal rather than the goal itself. The real goal, I think, is to put the player into a state of focus about the game and to really care about what they’re doing at any given moment. It’s to make them feel like the world existed before they arrived and that it will exist after they leave. To make it feel real.”

Jürgen “tante” Geuter: The Third Web

• “The promise of the Internet of giving people access to information and potentially the power of publication is supposed to be replaced with an unregulated casino that literally burns our planet to the ground. I can hardly come up with anything this despicable. Nobody is an island but the Web3 crowd wants to further individualize us, turn everything about our digital and ideally analog selves into objects for speculation with semi-automated trading of assets replacing politics. The full financialization and depoliticization of life with no regard for the ecological consequences. This is not a utopian vision. This is a declaration of war against a lot of the political and social progress of the last decades.”

Keith Burgun: “Handicaps”, “Balanced Difficulty” and the one-player perspective

• “There is a sense in which all games could be looked at as “1 player games”. When we play a game, we are always only playing from a single player’s perspective. We perceive things from just one perspective (our own, not our opponent’s), and we make choices for just one player (ourselves). In the case of highly systemic, deep strategy games, I argue that we not only can look at games as though they were all “1 player” games, but that we should. By doing so, we can focus on making players have a balanced difficulty, but it can also lead us away from rules that lead to “griefing”.”

Paul Butler: “Play-to-earn” and Bullshit Jobs

• “Any sufficiently complex game will come to realize, as Axie Infinity has, that immutable property rights are at odds with the ability to counter abuse. Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely hasn’t) are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in turn will just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway. Ultimately, in-game labour is just a re-branding of gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay to outsource it to poor players. In spite of being presented as the future of work by some venture capitalists, the incentives just don’t make sense.”

Sanny Syberfeldt: Random Challenges

• “I think having decisions be context-dependent is absolutely crucial for strategy game design, because that means if I get to the same type of decision situation multiple times […] then it will not be the same alternative that is the correct one in every situation, because the context is important enough to change which option I choose.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

a327ex: Auto chess formula

• “Wizard of Legend is a really cool game which I super enjoyed, but it has one huge flaw, in my opinion, which is that as you unlock new spells, you can choose any spell out of hundreds for your loadout of 4 spells to start the run with: Now, choice is a complicated thing in video games. Do I want to have the ability to choose things in a game? Yes. Do I want to have to make choices about every aspect of it? No! That’s partly what the developer is there to do. He will explore the space of possibilities and give me the curated, more enjoyable version of it.”

Joris Dormans: A Table-Top Feel: Designing Unexplored 2’s Fortune System To Replace Virtual Dice Rolling

• “The fortune system is able to express a wide variety of possible situations that would otherwise be difficult to represent in the game. I am particularly proud of the way it can handle social interaction in a meaningful way. We do not rely on branching dialog trees with many blind choices.”

Krystian Majewski: The 30 Circle Test

• “There’s a thing I like to say: Making games is impossible. […] It’s impossible unless you come up with some kind of trick. […] We are afraid of the scrutiny. We are afraid that somebody will call us out on this. […] I think a ‘lazy dev’ is actually something worth aspiring to. […] That’s the kind of mindset that it takes to finish a game.”

Rym DeCoster & Scott Rubin: Atari Game Design

• “If you understand what exactly you find fun about games, you will have a lot more fun with games. […] What are the main mechanics? […] Could I remove something without compromising the core of this game? […] The answer is usually yes.”

Tom Francis: Void Bastards Vs Heat Signature: A Completely Objective Analysis

• “Void Bastards is a roguelike first-person shooter about boarding randomly generated spaceships. I designed a top-down roguelike about boarding randomly generated spaceships, so it’s interesting to see how the two games tackled the same issues differently, and how well their solutions worked out!”