Game Design Advance

If you haven’t read Clive Thompsons article on Halo 3 in Wired, what are you waiting for? Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play

It’s an amazing article about designing games and play testing, and has a great quote on what it’s like to design a game compared to making a movie:

“The ideal in gameplay, the goal every developer aims for, is an experience that keeps players in a “flow” state — constantly surfing the edges of their abilities without bogging down. Modern videogames are often compared to Hollywood movies, but the comparison, many Bungie designers will tell you, is inaccurate. A movie is static. “You sit there and absorb it all in a single two-hour shot, and it’s perfectly linear,” says Frank O’Connor, one of the writers tasked with scripting the story line in Halo 3.

Creating a game, in contrast, is like a combination of architecture — constructing environments that influence the behavior of people inside them — and designing a new sport. Gamemakers have to devise a system of rules and equipment that gives players a few basic goals and then allows them to find their own ways of achieving those goals. The flow comes from constantly discovering innovative ways to solve these open-ended problems.”

Hopefully this marks my return to the blog.

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If you’ve been reading this blog for the past few weeks, you might’ve noticed my little emotional explosion over Tim Shaffer’s Psychonauts, a game which I have officially given up on and returned to the shelf of my collection. It’s not the first game that I’ve abandoned like this, however, and now that I’ve been settling into another game, whose Dispatches I’ll begin posting within the next few days, my thoughts have turned to all the games I’ve played and thrown to the wayside. Some of them were pieces of crap I never should’ve played in the first place, some of them were gems whose worth I couldn’t see until it was too late, and others still are titles I’ve still got hanging about, my ambivalence keeping them squarely within reach, but not quite within will.

As much of a confession as it is a catalog, here is a list of those games I’ve walked away from, starting with the namesake of this post:

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Nice salute to Freecell over at the Escapist. I don’t agree with everything Marty says here (especially regarding randomness and fairness) but overall quite a good article. Here’s a taste:

The trouble is most “real” computer games are dolled-up doxies that deflect attention from their real attributes (by which I mean gameplay) through alluring distractions: graphics, music and sound, story, artificial reward structures, etc. FreeCell, like many casual and independent games, is au naturel and unadorned. It rises or falls on its design, not on its packaging.

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Third Playthrough–1 Hour

“Psychonauts is not worth my effort…Psychonauts is not worth my time…Psychonauts is not fun.”

In other words…

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God is a game designer.

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An interview with Fumito Udea (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) where he talks about how much he likes the God of War games.

http://corybarlog.blogspot.com/2007/08/ico-of-war.html

Thanks to Kevin Cancienne for the heads-up!

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http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Work/Gamespace/gamespace.html

Make sure to participate in their survey, but also click on the image at the top to download a 6 page pdf file of their current findings. This is all about mapping how gamers perceive the games they play, and begins to break down traditional gaming genres. Came across this at GrandTextAuto.

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