Gehen wir im Folgenden einmal davon aus, dass Spiele im Idealfall das Leben ihres Publikums bereichern, indem sie intrinsische Motivatoren bedienen und immer wieder neue Erfahrungen bieten. Sie erweitern den Schatz an Lebenswissen, den ein jeder sich im Lauf der Zeit aufbaut. Sie sind tief auf eine ihnen urgeigene Art und Weise. Ein bewusster und kritischer Medienkonsum wird diese Erlebnisse in der Regel solchen vorziehen, die “bloĂź” Entspannung und kurzfristige Triebbefriedigung versprechen.
Es ist dabei im Einzelfall nicht ganz leicht, spezifische Werke auf Anhieb richtig einzuordnen, denn einige versuchen, Tiefe und Bedeutsamkeit zu suggerieren, wo keine ist. Dabei nutzen sie teils gezielt Schwächen des Gehirns aus. Sie machen “SpaĂź”, aber aus spielerisch fragwĂĽrdigen GrĂĽnden. Mehr Schein als Sein: Phantomtiefe.
“Playing around the RNG, thinking of how to control the RNG and tip it in your favor can be one of the most interesting strategic elements a designer can present the player. […] RNG isn’t bad, it just has to be used well.”
“It is important to remember that not all games are part of the massive mainstream game development machine, that prioritizes increasing the amount of pores on Nathan Drake’s face over the amount of things he can actually do.”
“Of course there are plenty of fine games with no flashy grand ideas, and plenty of “big idea” games that fail. And there’s no “idea guy” job where every six months you come up with one cool idea then lean back and wait for everyone to implement it. But ideas very much do matter, and quality idea generation is a skill like any other.”
“Trotz der Relevanz des Begriffs “Freiheit” in der Vermarktung digitaler Spiele und der absolut positiven Konnotation des Wortes selbst, bergen offene Spielwelten und -systeme markante Schwächen, derer sich Designer und Autoren zu jeder Zeit bewusst sein sollten.”
“Comparisons with other kinds of media and talking about the value of escapism is a rather slippery attempt to avoid the core point; book authors and film makers don’t have conferences multiple times a year where talks focus on building compulsion loops, snaring “whales” and using psychological tactics to encourage consumers to stay engaged for years.”
“Why is a story about love and friendship told mostly through killing enemies? Why is the narrative about experimentation when the system punishes the player for trying new things? What kind of feelings are evoked when players first encounter this mechanic, and what kind of story can I tell that fits it well?”
“Humans are complex, emergent systems, and so the things that matter to us are complex and emergent. […] Even [experience-centric players] are best served by games that offer both engaging novel experiences and engaging, complex systems.“
“Horror and violent TV shows exist, and the television medium also has been chastised for using violence as a powerful lure, but you can still see many shows that are funny, romantic, instructive, scientific, dramatic, intriguing, that don’t rely on someone shooting someone else to provide valuable and profitable entertainment. This balance doesn’t exist in video games, it seems.”
“Oftentimes, the reality is that complex cards are either too unfocused to appeal to anyone, too complex to actually work, or too difficult for players to understand.”
“The problem with many titles that make use of randomized elements is that they don’t create a different way of play. This is especially true of the survival genre, and how it really is the least replayable of games built on random gamespaces.”
“Information in games gets its meaning from its relationship to other aspects of the game state, including the history of game states; but most of all, it gets its meaning from your input. […] We don’t want things which just appeared to instantly be affecting the game state permanently, because such things had no chance to develop a relationship to the player.”
“When considering a new design it’s important to consider how much time it will take for players to understand the information you’re laying out for them, but also to understand whether your game’s inherent focus lies in reading or decision making.”
“Und bei der Wahl zwischen Faschismus und Moral gewinnt immer noch das, was sich gerade am meisten auszahlt. Moral, die nicht bereit ist, Ware zu werden, hat im entfesselten Kapitalismus der Gegenwart konsequenterweise keine Chance.”
Nun äuĂźerte sich jedoch Autor und Industrie-Veteran Wolfgang Walk mit “The Myth of the Monomyth” in eine ähnliche Richtung und gesteht langjährige IrrtĂĽmer der Erzählspiel-Riege ein. In der passenden Folge seiner Kolumnen-Reihe “Wortreich” (verfĂĽgbar im Abo bei The Pod) lässt er sogar diesen bemerkenswerten Satz fallen:
“Im Nachhinein, muss man sagen, hatten die [Erzählspiel-Kritiker] wesentlich weniger Unrecht als wir [Erzählspiel-Verfechter] geglaubt hätten.”
“This is a set of 40 games, that if you play them all you’ll have a pretty full understanding of the full scope of what tabletop games are and what they could be.”
“I get it: ‘Murderers can only recover their humanity through the innocence of youth.’ But will I ever recover the time I spent walking in these games? […] Even the games I liked this gen are still filled with this time-wasting, ever-present, empty, pretentious, unskippable-cinematics story time bullshit.”
“Players form a strategy when they put game elements together according to the rules of the game to gain a larger advantage or to find an optimal solution to the whole game. On the other hand, countermoves are […] the adjustment or backup plan when trying to play according to a strategy.”
“On one hand, building shifts the focus away from shooting, which makes the game more approachable and learnable. […] On the other hand, building inherently removes those most strategic components of the battle royale genre: rotations and positioning on a shrinking map.”
“The goal must be the concretization and emotionalization of the game core, not just a pretty packaging that has nothing or little to do with the core of the game. The dramaturgy of the game mechanics is the source of our stories. Graphics, sound and yes, words are our most important tools for narrative. The hero’s journey is not.”
Mark Brown betreibt mit Game Maker’s Toolkit einen der besten Gaming-YouTube-Channels. Immer wieder macht er einem breiten Publikum Game-Design-Prinzipien zugänglich und erläutert, warum bestimmte Spiele funktionieren und andere nicht.
Das gilt grundsätzlich auch fĂĽr sein oben verlinktes Video “How to keep players engaged”. Brown läuft in eine lobenswerte Richtung los, indem er klar stellt, dass er eben nicht ĂĽber all die psychologischen Druckmittel reden möchte, die die moderne Videospielelandschaft dominieren:
“I won’t be talking about games that use psychological tricks like Skinner Boxes, daily rewards, resource decay, loss aversion, and the like.”
Verantwortungsbewusste Designer sollten sich dieser Mechanismen nach Browns Ansicht nicht bedienen. So weit, so gut!
“But the thing is, that passion is the perfect medium for employers to exploit us. We’ll do anything to work in games and make games, and they know we’re desperate.”
“Systems literacy involves thinking in models, thinking with math, thinking with logic, using computers, reading and writing software. And it’s different from pictures and stories, which are concrete, vivid time slices of recorded experience. […] We are the R&D department of modernity. We are the artists who think about thinking.”
“Instead of trying to make an experience that tracked with the story, we adjusted the story to track better with what the prototype was that we had made.”
“I could rip all the pages out of a great novel and hide them around the city. The novel might be a delightful read. Looking for the pages might be a delightful scavenger hunt. But are those two unrelated delights that I just stuck together? The story of the novel might suffer from pacing issues as you find the pages out of order etc.”
“To accept the status quo means being fine with brutal, unpaid overtime, systemic layoff cycles, and other well-documented industry abuses. […] And the current trajectory of the video game industry seems unsustainable if something doesn’t change.”
“Maybe tactics games would be better as puzzles. Or maybe as some other form. In terms of the ‘game’ form of my interactive forms, it seems to me that strategy games are just better versions of tactics games.”
“At some point you have to step back as a designer and re-evaluate your inheritance. Does the core gameplay survive without the feature? Is the feature unintuitive making the game harder to understand or pick up? Is there a better way for players to be spending their time? […] In the case of creep denial the answers to all of these questions suggest that [Dota 2] would be better off without it.”
“You have three standard reads. The first one pulls you in and explains the core of your game. The second one fills in key details or big unintuitive rules. And the third gives you contextually important information or […] rules.”
“My style has always been to look at game design the same way as a mechanic appreciates the technical beauty of building a car, or a craftsman examining hand-made design. […] I don’t want to read a story on a major game site for the umpteenth time of how the game Gone Home moved you or reminded you of your childhood.”
“Our requirement that the player has to understand what’s going on in any situation restricted our game design options considerably. […] Just as a game design principle, we would sacrifice cool ideas for the sake of clarity every time.”
“A puzzle with too many elements is either too complicated or […] most of those elements aren’t actually part of the core puzzle, and are just busywork that will frustrate you when you reset the level.”
“Designing games for trust is also designing games for human fulfillment. It is designing for happiness. It’s designing in ways that are #good4players and their relationships. Play is Love.”
“In all the research that we’ve done […] structure is better than providing open and free environments in satisfying peoples’ needs for autonomy. […] Even if the game is enormous […] it doesn’t matter if the player doesn’t see meaning in the options that are in front of him.”
Into the Breach ist das neue Spiel der FTL-Macher Subset Games. Statt jedoch in pausierbarer Echtzeit ein Raumschiff samt Crew zu managen, übernimmt der Spieler diesmal drei Mechs mit verschiedenen Fähigkeiten und führt selbiges durch eine Reihe von Rundentaktik-Schlachten. Die erinnern, auch dank des Pixel-Looks, zwar auf den ersten Blick an Klassiker wie Advance Wars oder Final Fantasy Tactics, machen aber bei näherer Betrachtung einiges besser. Tatsächlich handelt es sich bei Into the Breach, von ein paar wenigen Schnitzern abgesehen, aus Game-Design-Sicht um einen herausragenden Titel.
Posted by Fabian Fischer 
Ludokultur 