Ludokultur

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

David Sirlin: Overwatch’s Competitive Mode

• “There is a Venn diagram of `what actually works´ and `what people will accept.´ We have to find the intersection and unfortunately reject things that `actually work´ if people won’t accept them.”

Frank Lantz: The Depth Project

• “If this is the right direction for thinking about this issue then playing a deep game will involve a complex dance between heuristics and pure search. And sure enough, listening to the real-time thought process of an expert player often reveals just this – the compressed knowledge of proverbs, patterns, and rules of thumb alternating with periods of raw, if/then, move-by-move calculation.”

Jim Sterling: Being Slightly Critical of Violence In One Particular Way

• “Find something and kill it. That’s how you do emotions in video games almost exclusively. […] And there comes a time where one has to wonder: Is this really as good as it gets?”

Keith Burgun: Auro, and my change in philosophy

• “My new philosophy is: Start with something basically generic […] and then you can nudge it in a good direction. […] People have like two seconds to figure out what your thing is. […] Your game has to be totally in the pocket of what people already understand.”

Samuel Ratchkramer: Tourneys and Ladders: A Response to David Sirlin

• “Competitive ladders and tournaments are two different things. While both a tournament and a ladder are interested in who the best players are, the ladder is only interested in player ranking as a means to an end: player matchmaking.”

Jenseits des Tellerrands

Jonah Lehrer: Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything

• “The human mind is a prediction machine, which means that it registers most surprises as a cognitive failure, a mental mistake. […] While authors and screenwriters might enjoy composing those clever twists, they should know that the audience will enjoy it far less.”

Scott A. McGreal: Internet Ranting and the Myth of Catharsis

• “The fact that venting actually increases rather than reduces anger indicates that Freud’s cathartic model is misguided. […] Venting and ranting effectively keep angry feelings in memory and increase rumination about the offending event.”

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

Anita Sarkeesian: Lingerie is not Armor

• “Regardless of whatever absurd explanation a game might provide, it should go without saying that the only real functionality of outfits like this is to titillate the presumed young straight male player base.”

Jeffrey Matulef: Combat fatigues: How Uncharted is a walking simulator in action game’s clothing

• “Sometimes you simply watch cutscenes and have zero input whatsoever. The rest of the time you’re being funnelled through intentionally frictionless scripted puzzles or button-tapping your way through automated platforming sequences. Technically you’re still “playing” the game, but your agency is left out of your hands.”

Keith Burgun: The Default Number of Players is One

• “As I said, you can absolutely make a great multiplayer game, and you may have good practical, social, cultural or business-related reasons for doing so. However, it’s unlikely you will have a good game design reason for doing so, since as far as I can tell, while the costs are small, there are no game design benefits at all to making your system multiplayer.”

Mason Miller: Why I’m Loving Overwatch

• “Orthogonally differentiated game pieces encourage intended strategic play. […] On top of that, Overwatch uses perceived affordances to help players remember what each character does. […] Even in their first few matches, players can use their pre-existing knowledge to make creative and strategic decisions.”

Michail Katkoff: 5 Reasons Why You Want to Quit Clash Royale

• “Clash Royale lacks the team-play of MOBAs and the depth of card games. The lack of content makes it extremely grindy and random. The lack of events and daily quests make it feel repetitive and stale. It’s also a skill-based game to a certain extent, after which it becomes pretty much pay-to-win. And it’s as much of an esports game as craps with loaded dices is a skill game.”

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

Extra Credits: Integrating Academia – Experimenting for Better Games

• “The incentives in current game academia are all wrong.”

George Weidman: The Astounding Absurdity of Minecraft: Story Mode

• “There’s merit to media that doesn’t patronize kids but rather respects them and Minecraft […] gives a huge amount of respect to players.”

Jared Allen Smith: The Importance of Narrow Game Design

• “It’s okay that there are games out there that weren’t made with you in mind.”

Josh Bycer: When Game Design Becomes a Grind

• “Nothing kills the player’s enjoyment of a game more than when it becomes a grind to play.”

Lewis Pulsipher: Why aren’t computer RPGs (especially MMOs) as much FUN to play as old-time D&D?

• “Fundamentally, then, it may be that these games aren’t as fun as old D&D can be because they are designed to stroke the egos of pseudo-competitive people who think they’ve accomplished something important when they reach maximum level.”

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

George Weidman: A Brief History of Bots

• “Bots give us a snapshot of the past. They let us see how games worked in their heyday.”

Josh Bycer: Analyzing Game Design

• “I find that within one hour, I have everything I need to determine if I’m going to enjoy a game or not and make my determination on the game’s design.”

Keith Burgun: The “Classics” Problem

• “Things don’t get bonus points for being old. We have to judge everything honestly by the best criteria that we have.”

Mark Brown: How (and why) Spelunky makes its own levels

• “Not allowing you to master the stages means you’ll need to master the mechanics.”

Seth Coster: Loops & Rockets

• “The unique power that games have over other forms of media is that they give players a sense of accomplishment.”

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

Brandon DeCoster & Scott Rubin: Designing Game Rules

• “If any adult person can read your rules and disagree with another adult about what they mean, your rules have failed.”

Charlie Cade: Walking in Video Games – The New Unskippable Cutscene

• “As one of the most obnoxious design decisions implemented in recent memory, I feel like the inane influx of walking in modern games can’t be derided enough.”

John Pavlus: Why We Love the Games That Enrage Us Most

• “Many popular video games are challenging. But why would players seek a game whose reputation seems largely built on frustration?”

Keith Burgun: Options in Games

• “Having options is giving up on the process of game design.”

Riot Games: Game Design Panel

• “Many people have a story, and so they say they want to create a game. Or they have a world they see, and so they want to create a game. But what they really want to do, is be a novelist or be a film director.”

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

Curtiss Murphy: Flow Space

• “[This paper] introduces a new recipe for simplicity that can be overlaid on top of the diagram of flow. Together, these diagrams create Flow Space – a visual guide for flow and simplicity in games.”

Daniel Steckly: Good AI is predictable

• “Ultimately, AI is a tool, the primary use of which is to drive decision making and increase possibility space. […] This focus on “interesting” being the primary virtue of AI design brings me to what will probably me my most controversial point: I believe that, in general, good AI is predictable. Good AI will do basically what the player expects it to.”

Justin Gary: Elegance

• “The goal of a game designer is very similar to that of a sculptor- chip away at all the excess until only elegant beauty remains.”

Mary Hamilton: Fuck Complete

• “Fuck beating games, because we are so far beyond that concept that for the vast majority of games it makes about as much sense as beating Michaelangelo’s David does. Some games are made of mechanics, and if you’ve mastered a mechanic as much as you want to, then you can stop.”

Rob Zacny: The State of Strategy

• “But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the established leaders in strategy games have been drawing from an increasingly exhausted well of inspiration for a few years, and 2015 marked the year they ran out of reasons to keep revisiting the same old ideas. When I asked myself why I should keep playing them, the answer was that I should look to smaller games instead. They remain the products of inspiration, not obligation.”

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

Extra Credits: The True Danger of Gamification

• “Sesame Credit has built a system to get people to enjoy falling into line.”

Jools Watsham: Game Reviews are a Mess

• “The problem is that the majority of game reviews today are purely opinion pieces based on how it affected a single individual, and not critical studies, digging deeper and going beyond emotions and personal bias.”

Keith Burgun: Why You Need the Clockwork Game

• “A Clockwork Game is not just like any other videogame or strategy game. It is a single, elegant system, built around a core mechanism, with nothing but the necessary supporting mechanisms and a carefully chosen goal. Through the careful use of this design pattern, we can achieve elegant, super-deep, novel, and super-fun interactive systems.”

Sam Kramer: Casual vs. Hardcore – Settling the Score

• “Separating everyone by skill level benefits everyone who plays – you learn more from playing against people at your skill level, plus the matches are more exciting! So the next time you rank down in your competitive game of choice, maybe take some solace in the fact that your matches are going to get a little less frustratingly crushing.”

Warren Spector: What Video Games Can Learn from Other Media

• “The key to the future of gaming lies in moving away from the ways in which we are like other media.”

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

Aktuelles

Alex Harkey: Evaluating Great Decision Points

• “Replay Value isn’t simply whether a game can be played multiple times with variety, but whether it is worth playing again at all.”

Gil Hova: Game Design 101

• “These three words are the most crucial for any game designer: Incentivize interesting behavior!”

Kacem Alexandre Khilaji: Reno Jackson – Getting Richer and Richer

• “As time passes more and more cards should come out that are, in a way or another, creating redundancy for a deck or another. And as these cards come out, Reno Jackson becomes more and more appealing to every class that gets access to an increasingly diverse toolkit.”

Keith Burgun: Clockwork Game Design Podcast

• “Art is like any other technology. […] It advances, because we get better guidelines, better criteria.”

Tim Conkling: “Are Games Art?” and the Intellectual Value of Design

• “[My new game’s] creation has much less to do with me trying to express ideas about the human condition, and much more about the exploration of a specific design space: short-session, asynchronous multiplayer games with lots of depth. I don’t know or care if my game will be seen as art. But it is an intentionally designed piece, and I care very much that it’s seen as something deserving of intellectual respect.”

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

Aktuelles

3 Minute Game Design Smart Moves – Damage %

• Keith Burgun versucht sich an einem Spinoff seiner Serie auf den Punkt gebrachter Game-Design-Minivorträge. In der neuen Reihe soll es speziell um gelungene Designentscheidungen bekannter Titel gehen. Der erste Streich widmet sich der prozentualen Behandlung von Schaden in Super Smash Bros. Der große Vorteil gegenüber herkömmlichen “Schadensbalken” liegt dabei vor allem in der stärkeren Verknüpfung zum Kernmechanismus.

Auf ein Bier

• André Peschke (Videochef der GameStar) und Jochen Gebauer (ehemaliger Chefredakteur der GameStar) haben einen Gaming-Podcast gegründet. Erfrischend offen, tief und vor allem kritisch handeln sie dabei wöchentlich mal ganz spezifische Spiele und mal größere Themenbereiche ab. In kürzester Zeit hat sich “Auf ein Bier” zum vielleicht interessantesten deutschsprachigen Spielepodcast neben Stay Forever entwickelt.

Designed to Addict – The Skinner Box

• RagnarRox liefert passend zum unten erwähnten Artikel von Keith Burgun ein Erklärungsvideo zum Thema “Skinner Box”.

Indie Artist Struggles With Branding So You Don’t Have To

• Blake Reynolds, Lead Artist von Dinofarm Games (100 Rogues, Auro), befasst sich in einem ausführlichen Artikel mit der Relevanz einer starken Marke – auch und gerade in der auf den ersten Blick weniger auf oberflächlichen Glanz getrimmten Welt der Indie-Games.

Psychological Exploitation in Games

• Keith Burgun ließ sich von Fallout Shelter inspirieren, einmal mehr einen Versuch zu unternehmen, die Spielerschaft ob der in vielen modernen Free-to-play-Titeln offenbar allein auf die Vernichtung der investierten Lebenszeit ausgelegten Designprinzipien wachzurütteln.