Ludokultur

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.”

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

Brandon Rym DeCoster & Scott Rubin: Atari Game Design

• “If you design a game with those constraints, it’s going to be a very simple game, a very focused game, a very elegant game. If it’s a good game, then it’s a pure design, it’s a good design.”

Chris Crawford: A 30 Year Game

• “There’s a game that’s been running around for thousands of years. It’s called religion. And the game designers are called priests.”

Elliot George: Systemic Information in Games

• “Games are all about mental models. As with any system that we are trying to understand, we make and test predictions based on our models, these predictions lead us to success or failure, and we update our models accordingly.”

John Harris: The Infinite Dungeon

• “Try to avoid grind. […] There are no interesting gameplay decisions there. It’s just increasing numbers mindlessly. […] Most things that call themselves role-playing games are 90% grind. Please do anything you can to eliminate grind. The human race will thank you.”

Phil Duncan: Game Design Deep Dive – Building truly cooperative play in Overcooked

• “With Overcooked we wanted to make a game where cooperation was a central pillar, a game which was much more focused on how a team works together rather than simply adding more players to a single player experience.”

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

Ashton McAllan: Games Are About Violence

• “The reason for the abundance of games about physical violence is the fact that it is the simplest or easiest way to introduce this agency and interactivity into the system, taking it from being a toy, puzzle, or competition and to being a game. If you are in a foot race in which you want to reach the finish line before your opponent, and you are allowed to interfere with each other, the simplest solution, barring further consequences, is to murder them.”

David Sirlin: Overwatch’s Ranking Point System

• “Work with what you have. Work with your generally uncoordinated or lower-skilled teammates and provide them whatever they actually DO need to win. […] Yeah that’s frustrating, but THAT is the way out of Elo hell. Having the system give you a ranking boost for strategies that aren’t resulting in a positive win rate isn’t a good solution.”

Jay Barnson: Games vs. Stories, Revisited

• “You can have a great game, or a great story, but not both.”

Jim Sterling: Pokemon Go, The Best Worst Pokemon Game Ever

• “But the hate, those attempting to rouse a backlash against the new hit thing, all the bollocks has been drowned out by what has become a net positive influence on millions of people. And that’s where Pokémon Go has become simultaneously one of the worst and best Pokémon games ever.”

Keith Burgun and Richard Terrell: Broad Statements

• “What I tried to do with Auro was, I took the roguelike concept and got rid of all that behind-the-scenes spreadsheet stuff and put all the complexity on the board […] instead of a character having hitpoints and armor and attack […] it all comes down to using the screen well.”

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

David Sirlin: Overwatch’s Competitive Mode

• “There is a Venn diagram of `what actually works´ and `what people will accept.´ We have to find the intersection and unfortunately reject things that `actually work´ if people won’t accept them.”

Frank Lantz: The Depth Project

• “If this is the right direction for thinking about this issue then playing a deep game will involve a complex dance between heuristics and pure search. And sure enough, listening to the real-time thought process of an expert player often reveals just this – the compressed knowledge of proverbs, patterns, and rules of thumb alternating with periods of raw, if/then, move-by-move calculation.”

Jim Sterling: Being Slightly Critical of Violence In One Particular Way

• “Find something and kill it. That’s how you do emotions in video games almost exclusively. […] And there comes a time where one has to wonder: Is this really as good as it gets?”

Keith Burgun: Auro, and my change in philosophy

• “My new philosophy is: Start with something basically generic […] and then you can nudge it in a good direction. […] People have like two seconds to figure out what your thing is. […] Your game has to be totally in the pocket of what people already understand.”

Samuel Ratchkramer: Tourneys and Ladders: A Response to David Sirlin

• “Competitive ladders and tournaments are two different things. While both a tournament and a ladder are interested in who the best players are, the ladder is only interested in player ranking as a means to an end: player matchmaking.”

Jenseits des Tellerrands

Jonah Lehrer: Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything

• “The human mind is a prediction machine, which means that it registers most surprises as a cognitive failure, a mental mistake. […] While authors and screenwriters might enjoy composing those clever twists, they should know that the audience will enjoy it far less.”

Scott A. McGreal: Internet Ranting and the Myth of Catharsis

• “The fact that venting actually increases rather than reduces anger indicates that Freud’s cathartic model is misguided. […] Venting and ranting effectively keep angry feelings in memory and increase rumination about the offending event.”

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

Anita Sarkeesian: Lingerie is not Armor

• “Regardless of whatever absurd explanation a game might provide, it should go without saying that the only real functionality of outfits like this is to titillate the presumed young straight male player base.”

Jeffrey Matulef: Combat fatigues: How Uncharted is a walking simulator in action game’s clothing

• “Sometimes you simply watch cutscenes and have zero input whatsoever. The rest of the time you’re being funnelled through intentionally frictionless scripted puzzles or button-tapping your way through automated platforming sequences. Technically you’re still “playing” the game, but your agency is left out of your hands.”

Keith Burgun: The Default Number of Players is One

• “As I said, you can absolutely make a great multiplayer game, and you may have good practical, social, cultural or business-related reasons for doing so. However, it’s unlikely you will have a good game design reason for doing so, since as far as I can tell, while the costs are small, there are no game design benefits at all to making your system multiplayer.”

Mason Miller: Why I’m Loving Overwatch

• “Orthogonally differentiated game pieces encourage intended strategic play. […] On top of that, Overwatch uses perceived affordances to help players remember what each character does. […] Even in their first few matches, players can use their pre-existing knowledge to make creative and strategic decisions.”

Michail Katkoff: 5 Reasons Why You Want to Quit Clash Royale

• “Clash Royale lacks the team-play of MOBAs and the depth of card games. The lack of content makes it extremely grindy and random. The lack of events and daily quests make it feel repetitive and stale. It’s also a skill-based game to a certain extent, after which it becomes pretty much pay-to-win. And it’s as much of an esports game as craps with loaded dices is a skill game.”

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

Extra Credits: Integrating Academia – Experimenting for Better Games

• “The incentives in current game academia are all wrong.”

George Weidman: The Astounding Absurdity of Minecraft: Story Mode

• “There’s merit to media that doesn’t patronize kids but rather respects them and Minecraft […] gives a huge amount of respect to players.”

Jared Allen Smith: The Importance of Narrow Game Design

• “It’s okay that there are games out there that weren’t made with you in mind.”

Josh Bycer: When Game Design Becomes a Grind

• “Nothing kills the player’s enjoyment of a game more than when it becomes a grind to play.”

Lewis Pulsipher: Why aren’t computer RPGs (especially MMOs) as much FUN to play as old-time D&D?

• “Fundamentally, then, it may be that these games aren’t as fun as old D&D can be because they are designed to stroke the egos of pseudo-competitive people who think they’ve accomplished something important when they reach maximum level.”