Game Design Advance

This recent Brainy Gamer post is terrific and I’m happy he wrote it.

I’d love to read more solid analysis about how and why this game and its predecessor work such magic with players. We’re drawn to writing about narrative games because we understand (or at least we think we do) their structures, and we have a vernacular for discussing them. [...] But I think the distortion field has distanced many of us from the vast majority of players and their perceptions of this game. It’s like we’re talking about one game, and they’re playing another.

Edit: My response is here.

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I have often thought that there is an overlooked dimension to the discussions about games and narrative. Many games encourage a particular style of thinking – a way of looking at situations as possibility spaces and applying systemic, algorithmic, and probabalistic cognitive techniques. And in some ways this type of gamer intelligence can be seen in opposition to storytelling as a way of understanding the world.

I usually keep this idea of games against stories to myself, because it seems unnecessarily confrontational. But in this TED talk, economist Tyler Cowen gives a wonderful critique of story thinking. As an added bonus, his advice to embrace the mess of our lives and the world reminded me of Ian Bogost’s recent Digra keynote. Maybe Tyler is a skeptical realist?

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Speaking of Jesper Juul, the other day a bunch of us were standing around after a lecture, and I was loudly complaining (as usual) about how often progressive game criticism overvalues expression of big ideas as the primary indicator of greatness. And Jesper quietly mentioned this essay by Susan Sontag.

I must have read it years ago and forgotten about it. Or, more accurately, never forgot about it. Reading it now is an inspirational mind-blower. This is what I meant to say.

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Here are a couple of things that I came across today that some of you might be interested in

First, our own Frank Lantz was interviewed by the folks over at Tale of Tales (really just Michael Samyn). I wish there had been a little more back and forth, but it’s worth reading for Frank’s further refinement of his argument against thinking of games as media.

Lantz contra Samyn

Second, Anna Anthropy has a new installment of her series of ‘Level Design Lessons’. This time she examines the design of the indie game Star Guard.

Anthropy on Starguard

Enjoy!

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I’m sure most of you have seen this by now, but I just thought I would link to a great post by Anna Anthropy on the level design over at her blog. Basically she dissects a small portion of one level from Super Mario Land, and shows the care and craft that went into designing even such a small corner of the game.

The piece reminds me a lot of the stuff that Richard Terrell has been doing over on his blog Critical-Gaming, which should also be referred to for some great insights into level design.

She mentions at the beginning of her post that she was partly inspired by a conversation she and I had about the lack of any real discussion about level design. The truth is that, as I’ve said before, I think the real problem is that most people who talk about games don’t actually make them. Anna Anthropy, Richard Terrell, and Steven Gaynor over at Fullbright have all written great pieces on level design, and they all have at least one thing in common: they all make games.

Also, if anybody’s wondering about the podcast she mentions, Noah Sasso and I are in the process of recording a dozen or so interviews which we’re going to edit all at once and then start releasing late August or early September.

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I guess I don’t really want to be in the habit of just linking off to my own blog, but here we go…

One of the projects at the Eyebeam Mixer last Saturday got me thinking (and rambling) about a topic which has interested me for a while: Applying “game-like” design to creative tools, especially to musical creative tools. The post is a bit long-winded and almost certainly full of misguided opinions, but it seems apropos to this venue, so maybe you’ll get something out of it.

“Game Design & Musical Play” @ Auscillate

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Things have been pretty quiet here at GDA for a few weeks, so I just thought I would pass on some of the things I’ve been reading that might be overlooked.

The first is a piece by Chris Bateman over on iHobo where he does a great job of summarizing some of the research that has been done on how the human brain reacts to games.

Over on Applied Game Design, Brenda Brathwaite has an interesting post on the difference and tension between a game’s system (what she calles the ‘database’) and its story. Be sure to read the comments!

Taking a closer look at narrative in games is Emily Short on her blog. The question here is what is the most effective way to use dialogue to create characterization in interactive fiction. However, what I found most interesting were the parts discussing the reaction of ‘casual’ gamers to dialogue trees.

On the other side of the system/story coin we have David Sirlin’s thoughts on Street Fighter IV. Sirlin gives the sort of expert opinion that’s always necessary with games as complicated as Street Fighter.

Finally, the last link isn’t a specific post, but a new blog that our friend Noah Sasso pointed me towards: SHMUPtheory. Dedicated to shooters, it’s just started and only has a few posts up, but hopefully the author will keep going!

Hope you all get as much out of reading these as I did!

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Dan Golding has an interesting post up on his blog Subject Navigator about Guy Debord and his concept of ‘psychogeography’.

This was a blast from the past for me. I first heard about Debord ideas and their connection to games from Game Design Advance’s founder Frank Lantz. This was back in grad school and when Frank was best known for his work on ‘Big Games’, which were games that sought to layer ludic properties onto the real world.

The connection between psychogeography and level design that Dan draws is a good one. He points out the way that level design is used to subtly manipulate player behavior, such as a directing and pacing them into particularly dramatic moments.

I thought I would also post a couple of videos that some of you may have seen but are a great visual accompaniment to Dan’s post.

The first is called ‘Averaging Gradius’ and is several individual runs by different people of the famous shooter’s first level layered on top of each other:

Averaging Gradius

This is a great demonstration of how level design can influence player behavior while also leaving room for individual styles of play.

The second is also a video of a bunch of different runs layered together, this time the game is a famously difficult hack of Super Mario World:

Many Worlds Mario

Here’s a game where the level design is much more punishing, leaving almost no room for improvisation. Each time the player gets to a tough spot he explodes into different possibilities but only one (well, two actually) survive until to the end. Beautiful in the way only a gamer could appreciate.

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… and they are us.

A while back I was talking with our friend Frank Lantz about when games break, and I was suggesting that a game was as bad as broken when a computer could always beat a human at it. What reason would anyone have for playing a game when they knew that high level play was exclusive to super-smart AI?

Well, that day is a long way off and may, in fact, never arrive. The day that is here, however, belongs to computer augmented champions. In Chess, at least. The Atlantic has a piece in its newest issue about how a decades old computer program called Chess Base 10 is helping new players reach higher levels of play faster. The article itself is a little scattered and I wish it went into more detail, but it does have a few nice little tidbits.

How long before the highest level play in Chess is done by computer-coached humans, or human-coached computers? Will the powers that be ever allow that to even take place?

Technology and games have an interesting place in games these days. Where some innovations, like the swimsuit worn by Michael Phelps that reduces his friction in water, are welcomed but others are shunned, like performance enhancing drugs. Does anyone know of some good articles out there that go into this discussion in more depth?

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There were a few things that popped up in my RSS reader last week that I thought were pretty interesting and didn’t get a chance to link. So here they are, just in time for the holiday.

James Portnow posted his notes from a talk he gave at this year’s Meaningful Play conference on the ethics and responsibilities of game developers working on ‘persuasive games’. His thoughts actually echo a great piece by Chris Sullentrop from a year ago. An argument that the fears of Portnow and Sullentrop may be misplaced could be read into a recent post by Michael Abbott over on The Brainy Gamer, about the admiration he had for the game design of Fallout 3. I would say that we give far too little credit to players in assuming that they are unaware of the biases built into a game’s design. Video games haven’t nearly reached a level of immersive quality that we have to worry about intentional, or even unintentional, brain-washing.

On a different topic (or is it?), Matt Thrower at Boardgame News has another good post that applies to video games as well as board games, namely the idea that games are simply “carefully dressed up mathematical exercises”. He then goes on to discuss how obvious the intrinsic mathematic nature of a game should be in its presentation, and how that affects the reception a game receives, especially among more neophyte gamers. 

Hope you all enjoy these and I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving!

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