Game Design Advance

This week we sit down with John Sharp, professor at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), to talk about his switch from art historian to game academic. Along the way we talk about the strange provincialism of game enthusiasts, what makes a game ‘good’, and the upcoming Art History of Games conference, which John organized along with Ian Bogost and Michael Nitsche.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 10 – A Conversation with John Sharp

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

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I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins recently and I’m still trying to figure out why I’m enjoying it. I’ve gotten far enough in the game to hit the point that I hit in nearly every 80+ hour RPG, the point at which I stop really caring about sidequests or character arcs and I’m basically holding down the escape key to skip past every conversation with a character not related to the main plot. The point at which I lose the patience to read about bandits robbing the town or the cave infested with spiders. So I must be playing because of the gameplay. Except I’m not really that interested in the battles – I feel like the important decisions I’ve made were choosing my talents in the level up screens, and the way I handle the battles has only a slight effect on the outcome. That said, there are some battles that are interesting, battles where that slight effect is the difference between winning and losing, but the vast majority of the battles are the standard slog through minions to get to the boss. The other main part of the gameplay, the character progression, is mostly a guessing game about the exact numbers behind text descriptions.

So what am I enjoying about Dragon Age? I think it’s this: there’s a system, and I want to break it.

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This week we’re talking to a veteran of the New York games industry, Wade Tinney. Wade tells us how he went from being a DJ in London to co-founding his company Large Animal Games. He also gives us some details on the New York game scene, the IGDA, and the design of casual games.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 9 – A Conversation with Wade Tinney

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

2 Comments »

Racing the Beam @ MIT

I really enjoyed this. It looks at game design from the perspective of the design of the Atari VCS (2600) system itself — how the limitations and quirks of that game console led to certain design decisions (good and bad) that affected some very seminal games.

I’m a programmer, so when I think about game design it’s very hard for me to completely distance myself from thinking about what would be easy or difficult (or impossible) to actually implement. Sometimes laziness prevents me from making design choices that would be harder to execute. But I like to think that having an intimate understanding of the platform (say, iPhone) gives me a more refined sense of how to make something good particularly for that platform. I can avoid getting mired in things that just won’t work. Like how painters study their brushes so they know what the possibilities are as far as texture, stroke weight, etc. So talking about game design from exactly this perspective clicked with me very nicely.

Also: I am just a bit young to have experienced the Atari 2600. I’ve seen them and probably poked at a game or two as a kid, but I’m of the Nintendo generation. Reading this book with the internet handy to watch some of these games in action gave a really great introduction to the Atari 2600 (or, at least, as good as one could get without really playing one). And this book contains a lot of info about the history of Atari (and Activision and other 3rd party devs) as well as the historical context of all of this.

Finally, this book seems like a great introduction to the hardware history of computers. The book talks about the chips, the design of the motherboard (if that’s what it’s called), and how the hardware impacted the platform. And get to learn a bit how TVs work. Electrical engineers won’t be impressed, but I learned some stuff.

So, yeah — even though this book can get fairly technical (on an introductory level, at least), it’s still a very easy read. Well organized. Fun. Very interesting. Great book!

(Crossposted to Auscillate.)

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