Ludokultur

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

Elliot George: Emergence and Chaos in Games

• “So there is a kind of tension here, chaos is good for increasing the number of mental models that we use, and therefore offers a lot of opportunities for systemic learning, but it also increases the usefulness of memorisation, which is mostly surface learning.”

Ethan Hoeppner: Information Generalizability

• “Given that the core purpose of a game is to provide the player with interesting decisions that the player isn’t certain about, every moment spent calculating is at best a moment wasted, and at worst a mental burden that distracts from the important parts of the game. Thus, games should seek to have as little calculation as possible.”

Guido Henkel: A new recipe for the roleplaying game formula

• “As I play through the current fare of CRPGs I can’t help but feel the genre has stagnated and has become utterly formulaic. I strongly feel that it is time for the next step in the evolution of the genre. Let us make use of the technologies and incredible processing power at our disposal for more than stunning visuals.”

Keith Burgun: Arcs in Strategy Games

• “Arcs is one of the main ways you achieve a structural through-line between playing […] and winning or losing. […] If you have a good structural understanding of your arrangement of arcs, it suddenly becomes quite easy to know how short or long your game should be, which historically has been a pure mystery.”

Michael Ardizzone: Analogy And The Process Of Design

• “There are plenty of ways we can improve on the modern process of game design incrementally, both through attaining a better understanding of game rules in the abstract, and also through using analogy more expertly and carefully given our knowledge of its limitations, but great power, as a design tool.”

Interview

Wolfgang Walk bei Pixelwarte

• “Die Kunstform ist als ästhetisches und psychologisches Medium oder Wirkfaktor zu jung, um so untersucht zu sein, dass es Experten geben könnte. Es gibt sicherlich Leute, die mehr wissen als andere aber echte Experten sehe ich noch nicht.”

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!”