Game Design Advance

Unless you were living in New York City this past Spring it’s unlikely that you were able to attend any of the series of lectures by game industry luminaries hosted at NYU’s new Game Center and moderated by the Center’s Director Frank Lantz. Well now each of the lectures are available as a podcast through iTunes, which you can find by simply searching ‘NYU Game Center’.

The lecture series included:

• Dr. Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games
• Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid
• Warren Spector, creator of Ultima: Underworld, the Thief series, and Deus Ex
• Marc LeBlanc, creator of the MDA framework
• Eric Zimmerman + Katie Salen, co-authors of Rules of Play

 
Highlights from the series include Ian Bogost literally speaking Greek (which is hilarious when you think about it), Jon Blow confessing that he doesn’t really play test his games, and Warren Spector saying that the most important story in a game is the player’s and then saying that he’s more interested in making games with authored stories. Also, if you want to know what I sound like, I’m the guy that asks a question in almost every Q&A session (and isn’t Eric Zimmerman).

The lecture series will be returning in the Fall and those will also be made available in podcast form!

Update: You can also download all the podcasts at the Game Center’s website here.

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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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Fans of former games journalist Shawn Elliot should check out the current Gamers With Jobs Podcast, as he makes a guest appearance. He doesn’t disappoint, starting the show by making an analogy between the game design of Gears of War 2 and humming birds.

The GWJ podcast is one of my new regulars now that Games for Windows is gone and 1Up Yours has deteriorated into endless-feeling discussions of the correct pricing for Spore expansion packs.

Enjoy!

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I’ve always felt alone in my preference for the music of Super Mario Bros. 2 over the music in any of the other games. I’m glad it turns out that there’s a kindred soul out there:

Link

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Anyone interested in digital game design should probably be somewhat familiar with procedurally generated content. While I think that there will always be a place for a more top-down approach, this type of content creation definitely leads to a really interesting aesthetic, and I don’t just mean the ascii graphics in roguelikes.

Geek Nights interviews Tarn Adams, one of the developers of Dwarf Fortress.

Link

Roguelike developer Andrew Doull has an ongoing series of essays about the death of the level designer. This link comes to us courtesy of my friend and associate, Noah Sasso.

Link

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A couple of great things came out of Montreal recently.

The first is a talk by Jonathan Blow, developer of the upcoming XBox Live title Braid, at the Montreal International Games Summit. The talk covers his concerns about the state of game design, its methods and conceits, and different possibilities for maturing the discipline in general. In making his argument he uses the common ‘design bias’ that most people (Ian Bogost being the worst offender) fall into when trying to suggest solutions to this problem, but overall I have to say that I agree with almost everything he says.

Next is the game Passage which was created by Jason Rohrer for the Montreal-based art-game collective Kokoromi’s Gamma 256 show. After playing the game for only a few minutes I knew that it would stick firmly in my heart next to Knytt as a game that invokes enormous emotions considering its scope.

You can download the audio recording of Jonathan Blow’s talk from his blog here and download Jason Rohrer’s game here.

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Cal Marching Band Plays Tribute to Video Games

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As most of you know, Ed and I presented Casablanca at the IGDA’s Demo Night a few weeks back. Oren organized the night and did a great job. The whole evening had an interesting spread of different types of games with different types of sensibilities. They were recording presentations and have now posted them on YouTube.

You can find all the presentations here.

The two parts of our presentation are here and here.

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The Escapist tends to run from fairly interesting to incredibly frustrating. Recently they’ve done a big graphical/interface overhaul, and one of the features that they’ve added is Zero Punctuation. Basically podcast crossed with a flash cartoon (a flashcast?), it’s voiced by a fast talking Brit called Yahtzee. I posted about this one because it perfectly reflects my feelings about BioShock. Hope you all enjoy!

Zero Punctuation Reviews BioShock

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This is kind of the direction that I was hoping to take Casablanca eventually. I especially like that it’s purposefully unbalanced, or at least balanced so that one side almost always wins. The documentary really got to me. I have to admit that it’s kind of the reason I design games.

The Documentary

The Website

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