Ludokultur

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.”

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

Adrian Forest: How Not To Talk About Game Engines

• “I’ve historically had to show game development students Unity showreels and other compilations to demonstrate the diversity of games made with the engine, and by extension, how little the use of an engine tells anybody about the game itself.”

Extra Credits: How Games Speak

• “No matter what we do as developers, our games will speak to our players. And it’s our job, our challenge, to find things worth saying.”

Keith Burgun: Interview with Greg Street

• “Anyway, I got a chance to chat with Greg about the theory [of input randomness] and how it maybe should, or could apply to League.”

Nikhil Murthy: Mechanical Foreshadowing

• “Mechanical foreshadowing is a design tool that can be used in a wide variety of games and should help with reward cadences and the impact of twists in your game.”

Patrick Lemon: Why Make Games

• “The structure of games reflects how we approach science and supports that understanding. […] You’re teaching people how to analyze and understand systems. […] In a way you could call that learning to learn.”

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

Keith Burgun: Interview with James Lantz

• “[James Lantz] was for me most notably a designer on Invisible Inc., a really interesting X-Com-ish tactical strategy game, and Mercury, a small indie Rogue-like game that really boiled down how Rogue-likes work in the smartest way I’ve ever seen.”

Raph Koster: The best posts of the last five years

• “And lastly… despite my feeling I am hardly posting anything, this is a pretty nice list for five years!”

Thomas Grip: The Complexity Fallacy

• “The player doesn’t play a game based on what happens in the computer, they play it based on what happens in their head. Any feature that doesn’t have a mental representation might as well not exist. […] In games, if a tree falls and nobody hears it, it is a feature you should cut.”

Wolfgang Walk: Unter der Betondecke regt sich was

• “Wir haben ein Zeitfenster von vielleicht, optimistisch geschätzt, zwei Jahren. Wenn sich bis dahin nichts Entscheidendes getan hat, um die Lücke zu schließen zwischen einer talentierten und international denkenden Indie- bis maximal AA-Entwicklerlandschaft einerseits, und Dutzende Millionen verschlingenden AAA-Produktionen andererseits, dann wird die nächste Gelegenheit lange auf sich warten lassen.”

Wolfgang Walk: Games go Gutenberg

• “Das Kunstformat, welches das nicht-autoritäre Versprechen des offenen Kunstwerks von seiner ganzen Wesenheit her einzulösen vermag, ist – natürlich, möchte man fast sagen – das Computerspiel: nicht jedes Game schafft es, das Versprechen einzulösen, aber jedes hat die strukturellen Möglichkeiten.”

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

Arnold Rauers: Creating tension in Card Thief

• “Different mechanics that feed into one core experience can create a rather strong feeling for the player, no matter how abstract they are in the end.”

Ethan Hoeppner: Plan Disruption

• “A good pattern to follow is the spiky information flow, in which high-impact information is collected into discrete spikes that happen at regular intervals, with a slow, regular flow of information between the spikes. Carefully considering the way information is introduced, and how that impacts the player’s ability to form plans, is essential to designing a good strategy game.”

Keith Burgun: Incremental Complexity

• “There seems to be this inherent conflict between accessibility and depth in strategy games in particular. […] The fact is that games just need to be pretty complicated to avoid being solvable. So if simplifying isn’t the answer, then what is?”

Thomas Grip: The SSM Framework of Game Design

• “The System space is where all of the code exists and where all of the game simulations happen. […] Story, as explained in this previous post, is what gives context to the things that happen in System space. […] It is when the Story and System space are experienced together that a Mental model is formed.”

Thomas Grip: Planning – The Core Reason Why Gameplay Feels Good

• “For too long, game design has relied on the planning component arising naturally out of ‘standard’ gameplay, but when we no longer have that we need to take extra care.”

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

Anisa Sanusi: Dark Patterns – How Good UX Can Be Bad UX

• “Dark Patterns are ultimately a cynical, yet working, method for developers to make quick cash. It’s a short term solution to a financial problem that yields little to no trust from your player base.”

Keith Burgun: Against score systems

• “Thinking of your game in terms of points, and these short loops of getting points, I think lends itself to a game that repeats many short arcs. […] The inherent nature of ‘gathering points’ is, perhaps, less suited for a strategy game than for a contest.”

Lars Doucet: What I learned playing “SteamProphet”

• “Each week, dozens of indie games release on Steam, and the vast majority of them will make very little money. And if you don’t get that initial boost of traction, Steam’s discovery algorithms are unlikely to lift you out.”

Michael Ardizzone: Tension and Interesting Decisions

• “Intuition can take us pretty far, since we all have plenty of experience with tough choices we’ve had to make throughout our lives, in games and out. But the structure of these choices, and how to design such choices in a controlled environment like a game, is seldom discussed in much detail.”

Sid Meier: Designer Notes 26 (Interview)

• “There’s the whole idea of do you reward mindless clicking, or do you reward intelligent play. I think we said both [in CivWorld], and I think that upset the intelligent players.”

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

Ian Bogost: Video Games Are Better Without Stories

• “To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one. […] To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media.”

Keith Burgun: Fog of War

• “So at both far-ends of the spectrum, you run into problems. So what you want is something in between. You want randomness, but you also want the new random information coming into the game to give players time to respond to it.”

Marcus Dittmar: Über die Kunst des Verlernens

• “Und so ist ein optisch opulenter Titel wie Horizon Zero Dawn am Ende auch nicht mehr als das spielerische Äquivalent einer Doppelhaushälfte am Rande einer idyllischen Kleinstadt, deren Bahnhofsanschluss noch eingleisig ist: Sicher, unaufgeregt und die AfD liegt in den Umfragen bei 15 Prozent.”

Jochen Gebauer: Warum sich Spiele der Kritik entziehen (ab 00:43:24)

• “In wesentlichen Teilen lassen sich etablierte Methoden der Kritik nicht oder nur unvollständig auf Spiele anwenden. […] Spiele bedingen den rationalen Egoismus des Spielers. Im Gegensatz zu vergleichbaren Medien und Kunstformen können sie andere Ideale nur bedingt abbilden.”

Raph Koster: Game Grammar and Design (Interview)

• “Game design growth is generally glacial. […] It’s fascinating to go back to the 80s and realize we have kept elements of something like a Centipede or a Tempest, but nothing came from Joust. […] It shows there is that exploration that can be done mechanically, but a lot of it isn’t done.”

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

Dinofarm Community Podcast: Episode 3 (Core Mechanism / Decision)

• “The clockwork game design model is built around a single core. It’s kind of like a thesis statement in an essay, or the controlling idea of a story, or the chorus of a song. Some basic piece of information that the design is centered around.”

Kris Graft: New Doom’s deceptively simple design

• “Here’s how [Marty] Stratton and Id creative director Hugo Martin defined the idea of combat chess: speed of movement; individuality of the demons; distinctiveness of the weapons; overall power of the player; and the idea of make me think, make me move.”

Noclip: The Witness Documentary

• “What makes a puzzle interesting is not really difficulty. It’s pretty easy to make a puzzle arbitrarily difficult: put more stuff in. […] This makes it harder, but not really more interesting. In fact it goes in the opposite direction of interesting. Interesting is when […] there is a clear idea that you come to see in the process of solving it.”

Peter Termini: Designing Around A Games’ Identity

• “Focusing on your games’ identity is extremely important, especially for smaller games/studios. Every game has its fan base, some are a lot smaller than others. If your fan base is small, that’s fine, but try to think about why they like your game.”

Raph Koster: Abstract Games

• “Music could be described as the art of sound, and sculpture as the art of mass, and so on. Games in some way could be thought of as the art of math. Another way to think of a game is that it is teaching us the machinery of itself.”