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.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Alan MacLeod: Call of Duty is a Government Psyop: These Documents Prove It

• “Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.”

Bader Chaarani et al.: Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children

• “As part of the national Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study and after controlling for confounding effects, results of this case-control study of 2217 children showed enhanced cognitive performance in children who played video games vs those who did not. Clear blood oxygen level–dependent signal differences were associated with video gaming in task-related brain regions during inhibition control and working memory.”

Edmund McMillen: Dos & Don’ts of Indie Dev Retrospective

• “I think honesty is what art is. Business makes it dishonest. It’s a difficult field for an artist to be in, because to some degree the dishonesty of selling something, or being a sales person, can easily taint your work, and you can attempt to manipulate people into feeling a certain way, playing more or putting more money into the machine and it’s a dangerous thing. […] Not being manipulative and condescending with your work is important. Knowing who you are is important. And allowing your flaws and eccentricities to show in your work is honest, and that’s what makes art special.”

Elena Petrovskaya & David Zendle: “These People Had Taken Advantage of Me”: A Grounded Theory of Problematic Consequences of Player Interaction with Mobile Games Perceived as “Designed to Drive Spending”

• “Players from vulnerable populations will engage with mobile games which have been designed to drive spending in a different way to players who are not members of such populations. Traits which may make an adult individual particularly vulnerable to such games include (but are not necessarily limited to) mental health problems, stress at work, low self-esteem, poor quality of life, and loneliness. These factors create an offline environment for the individual where they are not experiencing satisfactory feelings of competence and achievement in their daily lives.”

Sebastian Deterding et al.: Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play

• “Positive mood is maintained where the player predicts steady improvements in their error reduction rate. However, learning improves players’ actual and expected error reduction rate for a given challenge. Thus, with learning, uncertainty or expected error over a given challenge goes down, and players get used to the new error reduction rate. Players keep doing well, but slow-down in their rate of improvement, until they stop doing better than expected. As players aim to maximise the velocity of uncertainty reduction, they will thus preferentially sample new challenges that promise more uncertainty to reduce faster.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Jesper Juul: The Meanings & Consequences of Rules & Algorithms

• “I realized the other day that it’s been years since I had this experience of someone dismissing game rules as irrelevant or meaningless, and I think there is a reason: Our world is now so completely enmeshed in algorithms and in issues of algorithmic bias, that it’s now a given that rules, algorithms, and programming fundamentally matter.”

Lucas Pope: Cramming ‘Papers, Please’ Onto Phones

• “I created Papers, Please in 2013 specifically for desktop computers with mouse control. Now, here, in 2022, desktop computers no longer exist and all computing is done via handheld mobile telephone. Time to update this dinosaur. These thousands of words and megabytes of images will cover some bits of porting the game from big desktop to little phone.”

Matti Vuorre et al.: Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being

• “Conceptually replicating previous cross-sectional findings, our results suggested that intrinsic motivation positively and extrinsic motivation negatively affects well-being. […] Our findings, therefore, suggest that amount of play does not, on balance, undermine well-being. Instead, our results align with a perspective that the motivational experiences during play may influence well-being. Simply put, the subjective qualities of play may be more important than its quantity.”

Will Bedingfield: It’s Not Just Loot Boxes: Predatory Monetization Is Everywhere

• “As Hon suggests, predatory monetization salts the earth of creativity. The games built on these systems exploit their players—they aren’t art, but propaganda, another way to turn play into work. And the history of loot boxes demonstrates that the most exploitative systems can become mainstream if they prove they can turn a serious profit.”

Zayne Black: How To Design A Videogame

• “Many of you watching might be thinking: ‘Zayne, […] everybody knows this, this is useless!’ First of all, no they don’t. If they did, you wouldn’t get games that burry their genuinely very impressive mechanical gameplay loops under layer after layer of sludgy, tedious, ham-fisted storytelling, as if the cinematic presentation was the reason to buy it, for example. […] Figure out, what you want the game to be […] and then run every single decision through that filter of whether or not it helps you receive your game’s intention!”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Casey Muratori: What is the Blockchain Threat Model?

• “As soon as [decentralized systems] try to build dispute resolution into them, you’re right back to a government and a court system, which we already have and has to involve humans making these decisions. […] Dispute resolution is absolutely critical in finance. If you don’t have it, it’s dead in the water. […] I can’t think of anything [hashed chains of blocks] defend against, where actually you couldn’t have just made a much simpler system and then have the dispute resolution that you already needed anyway.”

Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games: Untangling Language with Knotwords

• “Knotwords creators Jack Schlesinger and our own Zach Gage chat to us about their elegant new logic puzzle word game. We discuss “cracking” the game design they’d been chasing forever, and how they created the puzzle/word generator that makes it great.”

Josh Strife Hayes: The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal

• “It is indeed fun, but it is also insidiously developed from the ground up to funnel every player action toward the cash shop. […] I enjoy having to engage my brain to beat a game, but if you do that with Diablo Immortal you will ask yourself lots of questions, and the answer to every question is: the credit card. […] I cannot believe that decisions were made in Diablo Immortal with the players in mind. I believe they were made with the payers in mind.”

Keith Burgun: Diablo: Immortal and Aesthetic Gacha-ism

• “The line between game design and marketing gets blurrier and blurrier and games increasingly become ads for themselves, a constant rolling advertisement that tells you to keep playing. Of course mobile F2P gacha games are the absolute peak level of this sort of stuff, but it bleeds out and infects everything else too, more and more, year after year.”

Kyle Kukshtel: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?)

• “If the role of mechanics design in a game is to best serve the content of the game, be legible to the player, and not introduce too much uncertainty into the middle of a production, the simplest answer to design is just “copy what already works”. “What already works” is a fundamentally conservative and nostalgic lens through which to view cultural production. Looking at “what already works” rejects an idea or potential of progress, and instead narrows the scope of possibility of a medium to only be capable or remediating the “greatest hits”.”