“The thing that makes a game actually work is often not the same thing as the thing that makes it sound cool.”
“We don’t have any idea what we’re doing. […] And actually it’s totally fine that that’s the case. […] Understanding games, in part, means finding out what we’re discovering by making them.”
“The classical way that developers have added longer arcs to tactical games has been to have a second screen, from which you draw a few variables, such as which troops have survived, what loot youâve found, and things like that. You often have some kind of base building or RPG mini-game, as is the case in X-Com, or Into the Breach. But what if youâre interested in asking the question: ‘how can I make the tactical game â the battlefield game *itself* â more strategic?'”
“Ultimately, if something can’t be made clear to the player then maybe it’s not a good game mechanic and should be simplified. UI isn’t a band-aid to fix broken game mechanics. And this is why it’s important to design the HUD in tandem with everything else and not throw it together at the end.”
“I play games to get to explore intriguing places, while challenge and story is secondary to me. But there still has to be a point to the exploration. I donât want to just wander around some place – I want to uncover something intriguing and ideally mysterious. But the mystery lies not in the uncovering; it lies in the anticipation, or rather the lack of knowing exactly what I might find.”
“The idea that games are ideally some kind of canned holodeck program induces a fixation on surface-level imagery over meaning and utility. […] I curse you with the seed of doubt. I curse you to scrutinize the games you love and wonder if theyâre everything you thought they were. But I donât curse you in order to share my pain â I curse you because in the end I promise it isnât a curse. I really donât miss all the lies, because experience has taught me that they absolutely cannot compete with truth, with the real.“
“Pico-8 provides both strict limitations and straight forward creation allowing you to easily make amazing playable creations in a few hours. Alongside the all-in-one suite, Pico-8 also provides a platform to share your creations with the community and a forum to meet other Pico-8 enthusiasts. As you would expect, some of them are insanely skilled.”
“Because it’s not supported by the game design in any real way, it’s all rendered largely meaningless. […] Watch Dogs: Legion is a strong reminder that innovation alone is not worth chasing. It’s only when those clever ideas are actually supported by the rest of the game and become a critical part of the structure, that they become legendary bits of design.”
“In a sense, games are evolving to exploit us. […] On paper, wouldn’t we all agree that getting better at a game yourself is much more rewarding than pretending you’ve gotten better by unlocking more upgrades? […] As a species, we have these collective weaknesses and, now more than ever, games are tapping into them.”
“Maybe VR is making the same mistake as traditional games: focusing on the sensory dimensions of representation instead of recognizing what kinds of novel mechanical and storytelling experiences they can craft.”
“For games developed explicitly around recurrent user payment monetization models, this reorganization of play as its opposite is fairly easy to identify. Dark Souls, however, was not designed for recurrent user payments. It has never included microtransactions and its one downloadable content patch was distributed for free. […] At the same time, however, Dark Souls cannot completely resist the neoliberal reformatting of play.”
“This common obsession with complexity (regardless how well intentioned it starts) is at the root of many problems in the industry. Lack of focus and vision is often cited as a reason for a project that failed, and/or caused significant crunch and stress to employees. It is directly associated with complexity.”
“The Strategy Dance: Players make moves that change their commitment and power along each axis (some moves also change how much an opponent knows about each). Each player tries to find a âwindowâ in which their power along some axis is sufficient relative to their opponent or the game state to allow for a win.”
“Roguelike Celebration took place in a custom browser-based text-based social space. Most of the UI and UX design were based on modern chat apps like Discord and Slack, but structurally it much more resembled MUDs, the text-based precursors to modern online MMOs.”
“Clockwork Gamefest: a conversation with a bunch of designers to commemorate the 5 year anniversary of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast. Guests include: Raph Koster, Dan Cook, Frank Lantz, Richard Terrell and many more!”
“The key to beating the game lies in making these paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries. […] Your tools haven’t changed and the places you can go haven’t changed, but suddenly you’ve unlocked a new rule about how to navigate this world because YOU have changed.”
Eine durchweg lesenswerte Abhandlung ĂŒber die diversen “Mehrwerte” des Spielens (und zum Teil auch ihre Kehrseiten). Der Schreibstil ist zugĂ€nglich und der Inhalt setzt keine speziellen Kenntnisse voraus, sodass sich das Buch auch als EinfĂŒhrung fĂŒr “AuĂenstehende” eignet und, sofern sich darauf eingelassen wird, durchaus Ăberzeugungsarbeit leisten kann. der Der Autor ist seines Zeichens Spielemacher (u.a. LamdaRogue) und Kommunikationswissenschaftler.
Aus dem Vorwort: “Ich will zeigen, dass Spielen an PC und Spielekonsole uns Erkenntnisse ĂŒber unser Leben und unsere Wirklichkeit auf eine Weise vermitteln kann, wie es andere Medien nicht können, und dass wir etwas Wertvolles verpassen, wenn wir Spiele nicht ernstnehmen.”
“What is the heart of the genre? Obviously there’s procedural generation, there’s permadeath and there’s that intense challenge. I see all of that as serving this big goal of learning.”
“When you have permadeath […] you are basically guaranteeing that early content is going to be seen over and over. You’re making a promise to the player that they’re going to die and so we as developers are going to make a wide variety of content for you at the beginning of the game.”
“Polish video game developer CD Projekt Red told employees on Monday that six-day work weeks will be mandatory leading up to the November release of the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077, reneging on an earlier promise to not force overtime on the project.”
“So are lives outdated? Well, it’s really down to how they are implemented, how they are balanced, how they are supported by the other systems in the game and how they are presented to the player. But more importantly it’s about why they are implemented. […] The most amazing games come about when every single system is added with intention, thought and care.”
“Failure of execution: I know what I was trying to do, the challenge wasn’t difficult or interesting, I just want it over with. […] Failure of foresight: I knew the rules, I failed to foressee how they’d interact.”
“An art form is going to manipulate emotions by definition, but we need to be careful about what it is we’re manipulating and if we’re using some of these emotional tricks not to serve gameplay, not to improve the experience for the players, but to reach our business goals by making players come back or spend more.”
“If an action is designed to be possible, is it a subversive result of an oppositional reading by the player? Or should it be considered a dominant or preferred reading, as the game indeed allows for it, and may not even discourage this reading by punishing certain actions through game mechanics?”
“To be clear, I always acted as was expected of me on my first playthrough, but the gap between presentation and mechanics became obvious regardless. One key factor here is just how often the gameplay shifts into some kind of scripted event. […] Flipping a script made it abundantly clear how little agency I had as a player. So all of a sudden the game felt like two puppets I was barely in control of acting out a film I had no impact on. […] I lost any interest in pretending to pull the strings.”
“There’s a huge body of evidence that says when extrinsic motivation is attached to a task that we already find intrinsically motivating, we suddenly become way less interested in the task. Other studies show rewards can also make people less creative, worse at problem-solving, more prone to cheating and may lose motivation entirely once the rewards stop, even though previously they were happy to do it for its own sake.”
“Kramnik presented some ideas for how to restore some of the human art to chess, with help from a counterintuitive sourceâthe worldâs most powerful chess computer. He teamed up with Alphabet artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, whose researchers challenged their superhuman game-playing software AlphaZero to learn nine variants of chess chosen to jolt players into creative new patterns.”
“Deckbuilders are fantastic at stimulating our creativity […] I think I’ve managed to come up with a set of three criteria that I think all well-designed deckbuilder card pools fall into: The cards need to enable synergies, they need to create interesting decisions as part of longer-term strategies, and they all need to have distinct identities.”
“Creatures was designed around the very concepts of empathy and nurturing, making it the closest experience possible to having a pet. To this date it was, and still is, an experience unmatched by any other game. But how could a game that is almost 25 years old succeed where even modern games are struggling?”
“I think that one of the things that games can do is help you develop systems thinking. […] Systems literacy is becoming something of an emergency, it’s important in a way that it’s never been in the past. We need to develop systems literacy society-wide, we need to train people in systems thinking. And the way to do that is by engaging with systems.”
“Again, it was the biggest jam in itch.io’s history, but this year’s event was, by my numbers, the biggest online-only jam to ever be held. […] These are my 20 favorite games from the GMTK Game Jam 2020, in no particular order.”
“The first commercial version of Curious Expedition was released at the end of 2014. In this blog post I will give you the complete overview of all the sales numbers of these first six years. How many units we sold, when we sold them, in which territories, on which platforms. I will also tell how it felt to tank with our game and how we were able to eventually turn it into a bigger success than we ever imagined.”
“Is it possible to make the entire narrative out of contextual dialogue? Instead of tying the conversation engine to something rigid, like an adventure game world, weâve tied it instead to a procedurally-generated Chess-like strategy game. Boards, moves, pieces… and combinatorial explosion. “
“Whenever there is quarterbacking, the actual problem is that there is a large skill imbalance between the players. This is a problem in all multi-player games, not just in cooperative games, though. […] If you have a group that you want to play Pandemic with, you have to try and make sure that all the players have played a similar amount, same as how if you want to really get into Chess itâs best if you have a partner who is somewhere near your level. In short, I donât think this is a âgame designâ problem.”
“These are games where your power doesn’t come through sheer brute force, but only through your ability to hide from the enemy. So having your sneaky status be fragile and fuzzy reminds you that you’re always at risk of losing your tenuous advantage over the enemy. […] But making the system completely obvious has its own advantages. It puts way more power in your hands and allows you to play with a huge amount of confidence.”
“The player is secretly playing along in several of what are known as âsocial gamesâ. These social games are specific phases of Facade where based upon your interactions, they can influence Grace and Tripâs feelings on a particular subject matter, their self-awareness about their underlying problems and their affinity towards the player. Every provocation, criticism or praise found within the natural language typed in from the keyboard will nudge the characters feelings on each subject.”
“Games are ways to learn and enjoy the skill of critical thinking, and I think a lot of adults don’t do a lot of critical thinking. […] One style of solving a problem is basically a pattern-matching style. […] But there’s this other way of teaching, which is teaching people how to be good problem solvers. […] If you can do problem solving well, you can learn anything.”
“Generally, the choice is between more polish, more ambitious game design, or shorter development time, and how much of each you can choose depends on your experience level and your available resources. […] One of the biggest strengths of indie devs is our freedom, which allows us to work in our own way, to make decisions swiftly, and to make bold choices that AAA studios might not be able to. It’s the lone wolf approach versus the large army approach. Unfortunately, it also means that we can be free to spin our wheels with very little accountability.“
“I expect boosters to become more this decade and coming console generation. I think it’ll be the new popular way of capitalizing on the concept of monetized grind, especially with the growing popularity of battle passes and the sense of slow teasing progression they ferment.”
“Structure exists in the rules of the game when they have high interconnectivity or high ‘coupling’. […] Because these rules are a holistic part of the game […] they have a multiplying effect on the system’s potential depth. Componential rules, or low-structure systemic rules […], have something more like an additive effect, by contrast.”
“So getting through […] any combat encounter […] means finding answers to four key questions. You might want to think of these as priority, preference, preservation and position – or the four Ps. All four Ps must be considered simultaneously and constantly re-evaluated as new information arises, like running out of ammo or seeing new enemies spawn in.”
“‘Never give up’ is really bad advice, especially for newcomers. We’re very quick to romanticize dedication, and we’re quick to look at folks who already released successful games and say ‘Look at them! They didn’t give up!’ […] There are ideas out there that give you something back when you work on them, but you need to explore to find them. You can’t explore if you never give up on the first path you picked.”
“An action funnel is any system in a game that takes a wide menu of possible player actions and limits it to a subset of currently possible actions. […] So help your players navigate a complicated and interesting game space without heavy proofreading, action parsing and calculation. Use Action Funnels!”
“Skill Compensation is the degree to which a playerâs performance is reflected in the final outcome of a match. […] Varying Skill Compensation can have both positive and negative effects on your game design, depending on what other properties youâre optimizing for (evaluation, learning rate, playfulness, etc).”
“1. Overpowered is much worse than underpowered […] 2. Variety always adds imbalance” […] 3. Competitive players often dislike randomness and luck […] 4. Balance automatically becomes worse over time […] 5. ‘Perfect’ balance is impossible”
“Environmental storytelling requires a certain level of deductive reasoning as we connect up details to create an overall story. We use investigative and archeological skills to determine relationships, cause and effect, and history. This makes us an active participant in the storytelling process and not just a passive viewer.”
“A playful strategy game is deep: there is a huge range of possible tactics and strategies. […] A playful strategy game is expressive: each player plays the game a little bit differently […] A playful strategy game feels low-stress. You donât have a feeling that if you make one mistake, youâre screwed. […] A playful strategy game has a balanced difficulty. […] You have to play seriously, but not so hard that you donât have room for experimentation or so hard that the experience becomes stressful.”
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Game Design | Tagged: game design, game jam, ludologie | 
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Posted by Fabian Fischer 
Ludokultur 