Danc at Lost Garden has another take on the utility (or lack thereof) of game reviews in today's gaming landscape, this one looking at the 'expertise bias.' He points out the disparity between reviewers and players when it comes to looking at new games — especially ones that have a gentle difficulty curve. His basic operating premise is that because game reviewers have plowed through so many titles and mechanics, they're looking at 'difficulty' in an entirely different light than vast portions of the audience. What will the future look like? He posits observation of other players is going to become increasingly important to developers, and if reviews can't keep up with that, they will really fall by the wayside:

If you are serious about providing objective insight into a game, either a title you are building or one your are reviewing, your expertise is not enough. In fact, your vast mastery of game related skills is mostly likely causing a giant bias in your judgments. You need to fight this bias by observing other players over and over again. They will do things with the game that are a source of wondrous insight. Your expertise becomes a tool for making great changes based off these insights, not one for predicting a priori exactly how all users will react to the game.

As for the current review industry, it is built on the unstable foundation of expert opinion in the absence of actual player observation. As games evolve and become ever more about first time learning experiences, the traditional game review will become increasingly irrelevant. It is arguable that they've already stopped informing most buying decisions and now serve as little more than entertainment for the hardcore niche. As the value proposition of reviews falter, the vast, churning, capitalist forces of creative destruction will replace them with a much richer set of game criticism that offers real value to its readers.

We've heard a lot about why the reviewing structure is broken, but this is an especially thoughtful take on the problem. I'm not sure it's one that can really be gotten around (critics — of the game, film, food, or book variety — tend to get those positions by being 'experts'), but it makes for interesting reading to be sure.

Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers [Lost Garden]

I wanted to make a game about how regret feels, but not necessarily about how to overcome regret. We both agreed that we should avoid the Deepak Chopra self-help angle.

My initial design ideas used 2-D platform mechanics as a foundation. Imagine making a mistake like missing a jump, but not dying from that mistake. Instead, imagine that mistake coming back to haunt you, forcing you to replay that jump again in the future. Imagine a level that becomes longer and longer as the regrettable past portions of the level are injected ahead of you - a future populated by past mistakes that you must replay.

Using familiar mechanics as a foundation can work, but I'm more interested in devising new mechanics that are the best possible fit for the topic at hand. I cast the net a bit wider and came up with the design that involves feeding animals. Oh, and killing them, too.

Worth a look this weekend if you've got the time — I didn't have much time to play around with it, maybe after I'm safely ensconced in LA for our E3 get together. Here's hoping traffic doesn't suck.

Game Design Sketchbook: Regret [The Escapist]

Lest you blanch at the notion of Solid Snake lumped in with Days of Our Lives or Waiting to Exhale, I would suggest to fans of Braveheart, Lost, CSI, and virtually every sports movie ever made that you are also fans of melodrama. The Call of Duty series, the Final Fantasy series, Bioshock - even significant portions of GTA IV - all rely on melodrama to deliver their experiences.

And at the center of these tales is the classic Melodrama Hero - a man (sometimes, but rarely a woman) of strength and courage who must do great deeds in an environment of heightened emotional intensity; a hero who operates within a clearly defined world of good and evil, charged with restoring order and stability from chaos. Solid Snake and Dudley Do-Right are cut from the same cloth. One may be a conflicted hero with lots more backstory (and, okay, Dudley is a cartoon caricature), but dramaturgically they function in remarkably similar ways.

I have to say I would think most people would blanch at the idea of Solid Snake lumped in with soap operas ... but he's got a point. Melodrama is a hugely effective narrative style — and the reasonably clear dichotomies we see in many narrative-driven games is one critical part in labeling them as 'melodramas,' or at least as media possessing melodramatic elements. However, I don't think the world is quite ready for the Days of Our Lives RPG. At least, I certainly hope not.

We do melodrama [The Brainy Gamer]

Video games often face a challenge: what does playing a game do to people in the world? In the case of entertainment games, such a question asks about the effects of violence on players, or about how players find and evaluate meaning in games.

In training, advertising, and learning games, the question asks how players take knowledge they learned in a game and apply it in their daily lives. The motivational (and compulsive) aspects of games suggest other ways gameplay can influence behavior. But such matters cover only part of the intersection between our game lives and our ordinary lives ....

Performativity in discourse produces action. Performativity in video games couple gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coersion or reflection.

The performative aspects of games go far beyond 'serious' games, and Bogost has a number of interesting examples — good reading for a lazy weekend.

Persuasive Games: Performative Play [Gamasutra]

I believe the videogames industry has an ongoing problem, in that a large proportion of the people who influence the game design process prefer Strategic play to other kinds of play. But as the audience for games has exploded into the mass market, strategy games (and other forms of Strategic play, such as adventure games) have become niche titles, with even the most popular titles selling no more than a few million units at most, while games with a wider appeal can rack up more than ten million units (as Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, GTA: San Andreas, Guitar Hero and The Sims all demonstrate in wildly different ways).

A good strategy game may well be a series of interesting decisions – but a good game is something that meets the play needs of its audience. If you want to make games for the new videogames market, you’d better start striving to understand just what those diverse play needs might involve.

Certainly, plenty of games are a series of interesting decisions, but as Bateman points out, it doesn't mean all games are, and many super-successful games don't fit the paradigm.

A Game Isn't a Series of Interesting Decisions [Only a Game]

I do love Lost Garden's prototyping challenge, though I will never in my life prototype any game, even simple and super cute ones. However, I always love seeing what other people come up with — it's an interesting exercise in observing the design process with playable prototypes. The latest is a cute idea that takes advantage of 3D engines and real-time shade. The basic idea is that you play a farmer who has to save his haul from the scorching sun:

You play the part of a rugged mushroom rancher who must collect adorable sentient mushrooms living in the shade. All you need to do is run up to a planted mushroom and touch it. It will pop out of the ground and start following you around. Lead it back to the start location and you'll be awarded multiple point based off its size.

Unfortunately, it is a scorchingly hot day. You can meander about the landscape of giant grassy blocks with impunity due to your meglo-awesome wide brimmed hat, but the mushrooms wilt quickly in sunlight. To lead them back successfully, you'll need to keep to the shadows and plot the optimal path home.

There's a lot more in terms of what the game needs to include, and unlike a lot of previous prototyping challenges, Danc is not providing art assets, though he does make some suggestions on what sorts of options people could employ. So, if you're sitting around this month and are itching for a challenge, wander over and check it out.

Shade: A game prototyping challenge [Lost Garden]

Anders Tychsen has some interesting ideas on how to leverage elements of tabletop RPGs in order to make their digital cousins more compelling (and thus keeping players enthralled for longer). Tychsen points to issues of integration — something many tabletop games are quite strong on, but an area that has seen less work in creating console or PC RPGs — as an area that could use some work, and create more positive gaming experiences:

Tabletop RPGs have for the past 30 years created personalized story-based gaming experiences for players worldwide. Given their likeness with digital RPGs, it would seem there are some opportunities for leveraging these experiences.

Character generation systems can provide sets of cues for the game engine to react to and direct content after, provides a reasonably simple method for integrating soft personality components in a programming environment, is theoretically simple to design and integrate, and can be scaled to accommodate different levels of intricacy and integration.

A personality system such as that observed in many tabletop RPGs has the further advantage that it is modular, it can be designed to change appearance and stats of characters or it can be strictly parametric.

It's an interesting take on what could be done to current games (without too much work) to make them more interesting (and personal) experiences.

Innovations In Character: Personalizing RPGs, Retaining Players [Gamasutra]

While some people argue that what games need is more monotony, at least in terms of black and white games, plenty of people are dissatisfied with the current trend of drabness in developers' color palettes. Of course, there are plenty of brightly colored games that are and will continue to be released, but plenty of people miss color. Bright color. I myself am rather fond of candy-colored palettes, preferring them to drab medieval "realism." One blogger thinks he has the answer to who stole the color from games:

... I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

I can appreciate muted palettes as much as anyone, but it's nice to step into games that are so far removed from reality that the grass is always emerald and the sky is always some slightly unnatural color of blue. Are teenage boys to blame? I don't know about that, but there's nothing wrong with prettily painted games. And you can be muted without being drab.

Who Stole All the Colours? [Quiet Babylon via GameSetWatch]

Wii Fit has gotten a ton of attention recently; reviews, criticism, and complaints have all cropped up in the wake of its release. Over at Lost Garden, Wii Fit is a launching spot for a broader game design discussion: Wii Fit and its ilk aren't exception, they're "merely the tiny tip of an immense iceberg. Almost any human skill, be it physical, cultural, political or economic can be turned into a game that enlightens and enables." Assuming, of course, it can fit a couple of criteria:

It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game. However, there are constraints. A skill must meet the following criteria before it can be turned into a game:

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
2. Skills can be nested
3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
4. Skills are measurable
5. Performance can be rewarded
6. Skills are locally useful.

As with anything posted at Lost Garden, it's a thought provoking little essay; while this sort of stuff will have little impact on the hardcore among us, one wonders what designers will come up with next — and how.

What actitivies can be turned into games? [Lost Garden]

Being inspired by concepts is not just a good idea. When your skill reaches a high enough level, it becomes a state of mind. Start by analyzing games in similar genres for good ideas. Dissect those ideas and learn from them. Then jump to similar games in different genres. Pen and paper role playing games and board games are a great next step.

A true epic-level master of concept-yoinking like Shigeru Miyamoto can take gameplay features from abstract activities like gardening. Pay attention to everything you see, from movies to conversations with friends to patterns in the ceiling tiles. Where do designers get the inspiration for new games? It's all thievery.

OK, I'm not sure it's fair to say it's all thievery (it sounds so bad!), but certainly there's a healthy dose of borrowing and reinterpretation. Anyways, even if you're not a tabletop nerd, it's worth a read through - there are some interesting ideas contained within.

The Adventurer's Guide to Thievery [Gamasutra]

"A game is a game is a game" — are they? The plethora of popular card and board game adaptations — and their popularity — would seem to indicate 'yes.' Over at the Escapist, Scott Jon Siegel muses on the future and potential of adaptations on a number of levels. Especially when one considers the casual market, familiar electronic adaptations make for potential casual hits:

Any classic non-digital game has the potential to become a casual hit. The turn-based nature of these games makes for a slower, more relaxed play experience. A working knowledge of many titles allows players to approach with some degree of skill right off the bat, lowering the barrier to entry. Name recognition also goes a long way in promoting sales. Any non-gamer perusing the titles on Xbox Live Arcade will more quickly download UNO than Outpost Kaloki X, Monopoly than Mutant Storm Empire. Board and card games are inherently casual experiences, and the digital adaptation market can only benefit from the growing success of the casual cash cow.

He also talks about traditional board games being a training ground for game design, and the increasing popularity of adaptations like Scrabulous in social networking situations.

Simplified Systems [The Escapist]

Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern have published the text of their very interesting speech given at the Electronic Literature Organization "Visionary Landscapes" conference; the subject is ELIZA, the 1966 parody of a Rogerian therapist — more correctly, it's where the next ELIZA-like program (in terms of influence) is going to come from and what it may look like. It's an interesting piece, coming from the perspective of "bigger and flashier is not always better":

We begin by assuming that computation and literary art are inherently very powerful. That is, we assume it is not essential to have recourse to networked communication, massive knowledge bases, or even graphics capabilities to develop a provocative, affecting project that inquires about important issues. In thinking about a such a project, we are seeking an antidote to today’s ever larger and complex computer applications — sixty-hour game quests within expansive virtual worlds, mashups of intricate Web technologies, and massively feature-bloated operating systems. A small yet powerful and surprising computer program would be both pleasurable and provocative because of its simplicity and clean concept. So we simply assume, rather than trying to prove, that while more elaborate systems may be interesting in some ways, a new system on the scale of Eliza can still have the sort of broad impact today that Weizenbaum’s computer character did more than forty years ago. Given that, we ask, what specific qualities would this system have?

It's worth a read through if you're interested in this sort of stuff (there's a nice, concise discussion of other systems that have had a big impact, from Tetris to SimCity to Google); Mark Marino has already posted a response.

Provocation by Program: Imagining a Next-Revolution Eliza [GrandTextAuto]

It's a job I don't envy — my research this year has partially comprised of looking at translations going the other way (from English to Chinese), and it's been very enlightening to look at the various ways titles get translated. They range from near word-for-word translations to titles that have radically different emphases than their American counterparts. Add to that the job of translating everything inside a work, and that's a lot of acculturalization that needs to be done. What games have done it well? What have really fell on their face? And if you had a chance to rename something - or tweak interior translations - what would it be?

Game Design Challenge: Rename Katamari Damacy [GameCareerGuide]

Emily Short has a thought provoking post over on her blog regarding interactive fiction for the "hard-casual" crowd. Can the modern crop of interactive fiction appeal to that segment of the market that isn't the traditional IF crowd, nor the "match three" type of casual player, nor the hardcore audience? Sounds sort of like a contradiction of terms, since IF is pretty niche to begin with, but she lays out her reasoning really well. On why the hard casual market:

In the original context, this referred to the idea of a game made to AAA production values, but paced for a busier lifestyle. In practice, what I’m seeing is something less dramatic: increased attention to ambitious indie games that are promoted on some casual game review sites but that go beyond the average/obvious.

This is a gaming audience ideal for IF to target. (This is not to say that IF shouldn’t also target readers, students, and other niches that we’ve sometimes identified. But in the gaming landscape, I think there’s more of an identifiable market than there has been for a long time.)

Yes? No? Maybe? There's a lot of creative IF floating around right now, and I think if it wound up at the right places (like JayIsGames as she mentioned), it could open up a whole new audience. The question is - do the creators want that bigger audience?

IF for the hard-casual gamer? [Emily Short]

We historians are a little protective of our respective domains — but a constant (and well-deserved) criticism we lob at each other in general is that through various means, we deliberately make ourselves inaccessible to the average, interest layperson. Over at Terra Nova, Nate Combs takes up the question of historical video games, referencing a great 2006 New York article by Niall Ferguson (Harvard professor and historian) on the 'state of play.' The answer? Pretty damn bad, at least when looking on from the Ivory Tower:

So why do I hate Medal of Honor? The trouble is—and the same could be said of nearly all its competitors—it’s profoundly unhistorical. It’s what’s known in the games trade as a first-person shooter (FPS) game. As a player, you take on the role of Lieutenant Mike Powell of the U.S. Army Rangers. You see the battlefield—a Normandy beach, for instance—from his vantage point. As Lieutenant Powell, you do pretty much what you feel like—which is to bag as many Germans as you can. In reality, an officer’s principal concern on Omaha Beach was somehow to maintain the cohesion of his unit in the face of a lethal storm of steel.

He does go on to have some slightly more positive things to say, but Combs' takes up the issue — the boardgames that generally do a better job of 'playing with history' frequently provide a lot more 'meat' for the historical stew:

Where I think these board games triumphed was in their ability to communicate history as a coherent model: history as a system of rules. History as an interlocking LEGO set of measured hypotheticals and realities. Players moved the pieces around to see what happens. If it was only an amateur's recollection, it was a rich one.

(This historian would offer that when you actually see history as a system of rules, you wind up with modernization theory, but for the purposes of play — it's useful. Let's just stay away from a Reischauer's Making of Modern Japan when thinking up new titles)

So where's the difference between board games and console or PC games?

... historical simulation games were never big business, not in the way mass entertainment console gaming (for example) is. Another way of saying this is, perhaps, to say that these games were largely developed for and by amateurs.

One could only suppose that if more video game product were developed by amateurs that we might see more history, more playing with history, and - to cite Niall Ferguson's claim - a greater appreciation in society of the lessons of history.

Considering the relative popularity of ahistorical FPS that use the trappings and 'hardware' of historical settings, I can't imagine 'real' history will ever be big business — but maybe someday. A historian can dream.

Playing with history [Terra Nova]; How to Win a War [New York]

The $1,000 winning design "Escape Your Boyfriend's Room" by Jorge Goyco is an interesting point and click game that manages to get both the warning signs of an abusive relationship across as well as how you can get yourself out of the relationship. I loved the look of the game and its approach to the subject matter really impressed me.

The first runner up $100 prize was handed out to "A Walk in the Park by Jared Sain." I loved the look of the game. My only suggestion is that maybe the game could do a better job of explaining how to get out of an abusive relationship. The final $100 runner-up was "Decisions, Decisions by Mark Kakareka"

Judges for the contest were my brother, Drew Crecente; Simon Carless, director of the Independent Games Festival; Stephen Totilo, of MTV and huge brain fame, Georgia Tech prof Ian Bogost and Dr. Elizabeth Richeson, a psychologist, Texas Psychological Association Board member, and my mom.

The winning entries were quite innovative, but more importantly I think this particular contest reiterates the mantra that video games can deal with important and delicate issues appropriately.

My understanding is that Drew plans to run the contest again next year. I hope it has just as many good entries. Hit up the site to check out the winners.

Jennifer Ann's Group

The fact of the matter is, game genres by their very nature become established because games borrow mechanics, structural elements, and conventions from earlier games. To have a videogame genre is to recognise a recurrent pattern of plagiarism that draws upon the successes of earlier games as its bedrock. This is a good thing for players: few but the most grizzled gamer hobbyists can face learning entirely original game rules every time they play, most prefer to play something that (in broad strokes, at least) strongly resembles an earlier game they have enjoyed. It means they have less to learn, and it increases the chance that they will enjoy the later game.

As he later points out, "what would be considered plagiarism in other media is the backbone and lifeblood of the videogame industry" — clearly that's not such a bad thing, but it does make for some wild accusations at times.

Plagiarism in Videogames? [Only a Game]

... While some of these objections deserve attention — and their effects should be ameliorated when possible — I think that demanding that difficulty levels be "banned" from all games is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

More importantly, Glassner's objections ignore the most important rule of game design of all: empathize with the player, i.e. provide what he wants. Players want settable difficulty levels, and removing them for purely theoretical reasons is not a good way to serve your audience.

He's got some interesting suggestions on how to implement dynamic difficulty settings, as well as potential fixes to some other issues or problems with difficulty levels.

The Designer's Notebook: Difficulty Modes and Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment [Gamasutra]

Once upon a time, games were competitors. Now, primarily, they're entertainers. They aimed to beat you. Now, to be beaten. Our language says much, really. While we've talked about difficulty curves forever, the problems now are "difficulty spikes." No one ever critiques a game for a difficulty-trough - because the former stops you getting anywhere and the latter is just something you coast throug

I'm not one of those gamers that particularly enjoys having my ass handed to me to the point where I simply cannot complete a game, though there are plenty of games that have challenged me to (my) max - I'm also the obsessive type, so the pattern of having side quests and optional challenges galore in my games of choice usually means I have more than enough to keep me busy. This question of balancing the commercial needs of AAA titles with what 'real' gamers (however you want to define that) want to see is an increasingly pressing problem — though not one that I expect will be resolved any time soon, other that to push more and more 'styles' of games towards the fringes.

Hard Times: The Future of Difficult Video Games

When you take or teach courses called, for example, Game Studies 101; when you hold a degree in "new media studies" (wink, wink); when you publish your research in a journal called Game Studies; or when you actually are a professor of game studies, you end up feeling like you know what games do - and what they should do.

That wouldn't be so bad - it's business-as-usual for academics, in fact - if game studies didn't harbor what amounts to a desperate need to lay claim to ownership of game design as well as theory. It turns out that they don't just want to write articles and grant Ph.D.'s - they want to design our games, too.

Well, Ian Bogost — one of those people Travis is referring to — fired back

A considerable portion of my first book and my other writings object to the very idea that game studies stands alone. You cite a three-year-old prolegomenon by Aarseth, one meant as a provocation (something he's known for), and decide to attribute it to all game scholars. You make a "plea to gamers to turn the tables on Aarseth and other doyens of game studies" (myself included). Many (most?) of us already have done work to turn those very tables. Do you actually read any game studies scholarship?

Oh, snap. I consider myself lucky to be in a field that doesn't really suffer from a 'real world' vs. 'academic' split — we have enough drama amongst ourselves. The debate continues in the comment sections of both pieces, and is worth paging through if you have the time.

Quibus Lusoribus Bono? Who is Game Studies Good For? [Escapist] & A Response to Roger Travis [Ian Bogost] [both via GrandTextAuto]

... the potential is great. We craft every aspect of videogame worlds in excruciating detail: the marbled, diffracted surfaces of water, the filthy grit of alleyways, the splintered grain of bombed-out church rafters.

We render the visual and aural aspects of these worlds in startling vividness and at great expense. But those worlds remain imprisoned behind the glass of our televisions and our monitors. Rez shows us that as far as texture is concerned, games can be as much like food as they are like film.

He's clearly not advocating that all games can — or should — be Rez, but it's just another aspect we should be paying attention to. And, unlike a lot of ideas that get floated about improving the gamer-game interaction, ramping up the tactile factor when warranted seems easy enough to do.

Persuasive Games: Texture [Gamasutra]

I dress like the guy in The Fly. My closets is filled with row upon row of identical pragmatic clothes. I wouldn't know the difference between a cardigan and a camisole if my life depended on it (I actually had to look it up.)

Yet many avatars, especially those in online games, are ultimately about fashion and style. The cut of the fabric is important. The patterns matter. The colors...don't even get me started on the colors. It is no surprise that some online game companies (like StarDolls) build up such an expertise in fashion that they are launching their own real world clothing lines. So I've been reading women's fashion mags. It's a whole different world out there.

Oh, how we suffer for our art. Of course, there's more in the little essay than fashion tips, but it's a nice little primer on what goes into putting together even the simplest of avatars.

The joy of 2D avatars [Lost Garden]

It's biggest problem, the handicap it is largely unable to throw off, is that it is the latest in a long line of Mario games and must struggle to balance not only the varied play needs of the modern gaming audience against each another, it must do this against the backdrop of a franchise history unparalleled by any other game in existence. The weight of this history is too much to be overcome in some cases. Between these competing forces, it was always going to be difficult to innovate and amaze, and certainly this game could not hope to exceed the wonderment that Super Mario 64 could provide with its dynamic (and unrepeatable) transition from 2D to 3D.

It's a lengthy but interesting look at a popular title and worth (as almost all Only a Game essays are) spending some time with.

Super Mario Galaxy [Only a Game]

"What I want to do is craft this landscape of experiences where the player has a huge degree of control over what they encounter," he says. "I think that's what games have as an advantage over any other form of media; that the player is half the author of the experience if the game is done well - or even more so. I think this is the first form of medium which has really achieved that and it allows us access to emotional regions that are inaccessible to linear narrative."

Is Spore going to be the success many think it will be, or will it confound the average user (unlike The Sims) as Ian Bogost suspects? Or will people lose interest together before the thing is finally released? I guess we'll find out ... eventually.

Unlocking the power of parallel play [The Guardian via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Is the "insincere choice" (telling the player they have no choice while they actually do) the best means we have to present a subversive message? If we are locked into a rule system by the nature of the game's code we can never change the system, what would be the ultimate extent in this regard? Making a game that allows the players to create their own rules, would almost seem to devolve very quickly into art-piece.

The resulting experience might have something profound to say about the abstract notions of games as a subversive medium, but would it lack enough direction/focus to be captivating in the slightest, and therefore possibly unable to be profound or meaningful to an individual?

I don't really look towards my games for 'subversive' material (having plenty of daring literature bumping around my shelves, sometimes I just want to get away), but Pfeifer provides some food for thought on how a variety games get their point across.

How Can A Game Be Subversive? [GameSetWatch]

Some people may disagree with this statement, but frankly if there is one platform where most of the radical innovation in video game design is happening, that platform is the World Wide Web. For every innovative Wii game in the market, there are dozens of innovative Flash games.

It's not only because the barriers of entry and the production costs are lower, it's also a platform open for experimentation. You can throw something out there, discover that you wanted to change something, change it on your server, and boom, it's available for everybody else.

There are some other interesting bits of information contained within the article ('Don't spend more than $200K developing a game for XBLA!'), and some stats and predictions as well.

The State of Indie Gaming [Gamasutra]

Games that don't recognize that key fact have what we call a "false depth economy"; a situation in which currency is rapidly devalued until it becomes irrelevant - or possibly even aggravating - to gameplay. Remember putting rupees back into chests in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess? Or ignoring the store in Star Fox Adventures entirely after the first few hours? These are both bright examples of what happens when the economy doesn't work as planned.

I can't argue that good games haven't fallen to this problem before but succeeded nonetheless. Nobody is going to throw down Twilight Princess in disgust over rupee returns. But I can assure you that it's a design problem that every designer wishes they could take back and fix, and one that every player will write down as a negative about their overall experience with a game.

He lays out three principles that ought to be followed — it's a quick article and worth a read if you're interested in game design.

Single Player Economist [Moogle.net via GameSetWatch]

The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey [Cracked.com - Thanks Michael!]

I started fumbling my way through instead of actually understanding the exact solution and executing it flawlessly. I beat the boss at the end of the branching-paths level but I'm still not sure how I did it. This again reminds me of taking a math exam and writing down some random number because I kind of figured that was the answer, but couldn't crisply explain it. There are plenty of games that you can win just by randomly mashing buttons - say, any number of fighting games - and everyone's played an adventure game where you combine the plunger with the rubber ducky and the shoelace and somehow manage to fish the key out of the grate, but the only reason you threw all that crap together is that it was the only stuff left in your inventory.

That said, Braid has little tolerance for half-assedry.

I personally didn't find it maddening, since there's no penalty for screwing up and it's pretty easy to hop back and forth between levels if you find yourself hideously stuck (sometimes it's better to just come back later). The experimentation was what made the game fun for me; if I couldn't 'crisply' explain how I did something, did it really matter? I've come through more than one boss battle or game level on little more than luck and just managing to survive; since Braid doesn't have a death penalty, 'managing to survive' isn't a concern, and that luck can lead to happy accidents that will allow you to understand exactly how to manipulate the controls.

Braid: More Fun Than Calculus! [Save the Robot]

Game-industry critics object to any overt or implied elements of sex or racism that crop up in the course of play. Often, the gaming community's knee-jerk defense against these critics is to contend that they don't know what they're talking about. In many cases, this is true. But in their haste to polish their pet medium's reputation, gamers ignore the other side of the coin — namely that, in some instances, the bluenoses have a point.

The truth is that some games are irresponsible in regard to the fantasies they effectively promote. But instead of arguing for the validity of games on their merits, gamers may blindly lash out at their critics. Passionate advocacy means engaging our antagonists, not attacking them. It means not taking the bait. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.

The unfortunate thing is the response to these types of articles is frequently the knee-jerk reaction Krpata and others are talking about. We'd all do well to keep some of these internal criticisms of the community in mind when the next scandal rolls around ...

Sex, Violence and Video Games [The Phoenix via GameSetWatch]

In fact, what is most disturbing to me is that Malone's papers aren't cited more often, or indeed, required reading for game designers.

The papers are packed full of little observations which remain as poignant today as ever. For instance, in the 1980 paper Malone notes in the context of the way the game communicates success and failure to the player:

...performance feedback should be presented in a way that minimized the possibility of self-esteem damage.

This is a lesson that a staggering number of videogames have never learned! Most players are easily discouraged, and yet a macho, conqueror-style ethos is still quite prevalent, with failure being met with abuse and ridicule (even in an otherwise charming game such as Katamari Damacy - although at least in this case a touch of humour offsets the problem).

Definitely worth a read through, as most Only a Game posts are.

Malone on Curiosity [Only a Game]

... I look back all the way to the dawn of mankind: to ruins, and Greek architecture, and Mycenean architecture, all the way up to the architecture of the Crusades, and castles in North Africa, and the Romanesque and Gothic and Baroque and Rococo - even to neo-Classical and art deco and Bauhaus and Modernist. I mean, there are bits and pieces here and there that make a strong impression on me, and I blend them - but that's the beauty of games. You don't have to be stylistically pure, or even coherent. You can afford a certain eclecticism to your work. It's a more forgiving medium. I can blend elements from the Potala Palace in Tibet with, say, La Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí's cathedral. I really take a lot of liberties with whatever I can use, wherever I can find it.

You can find more examples of Dociu's work at his website or BLDGBLOG's Flickr photostream.

Game/Space: An Interview With Daniel Dociu [BLDBLOG]

Why were we so quick to leave black and white behind as we moved on from Pong and Spacewar!, and so quick to assume that these 15, 52, 512 or 16.7 million new colours were necessities not possibilities? Why, other than the small consideration of it being certain commercial suicide, did so few designers chose to keep things monotonous? Why can't I think of a single voluntarily black-and-white game, from the last ten years, since my best candidate, Vib Ribbon, turns out to have a little hint of pastel indulgence in its scoring display.

I admit that while I adore old black and white film (more because I'm a fan of silent movies than because I'm so wild about monotony), but I do like my games to be vibrant — the washed out grey-and-browns is getting a little old. But I'm all for black and white if it's executed well — I've seen several modern films that utilize black and white and color to great effect. I suspect the game industry made a rush for color because, well, that's what humans do when a newer and cooler technology comes along.

Monotony [Lookspring]

It's about... I didn't mention this in my presentation, I keep forgetting to... it's about damaging not the character, but damaging the player. I think insulting the player is something... to put the knife in his back, not just the character's back. Because every game has the knife go in the character's back.

But if your perception of reality is screwed with, and you're basically played for a sucker, people have an emotional response to that. It's like when you read people saying, "I just put down the controller and walked away from the game for a minute." That doesn't happen when your character gets thrown off a roof and knocked unconscious, or gets shot at and wounded.

Even if you're tired of BioShock, it's an interesting interview that hits on a number of issues.

Ken Levine on BioShock's Narrative Drive

A key part of the development process, I am told, is pitching your game ideas to studios and publishers. After some practice, I believe I am starting to get good at this. For instance, I know that if you want to be taken seriously as a professional, you need to use something called "Powerpoint". In fact, I have been writing all my game proposals in Powerpoint and I am starting to see a marked improvement in the quality of my ideas.

It's funny (I laughed — a lot) and worth a couple of minutes of your time.

The Pitch [Hit Self-Destruct via GameSetWatch]

The massive palette of game actions only serves to confuse and frustrate the player when challenged. The game's perfect cohesion in all other areas should have supported a strong play aesthetic; instead, players walk away from BioShock without a unified gameplay experience.

And while some of these games are successful, this success is always attributable to other extraordinarily polished aspects of the game. Great graphics and storylines are always desirable, but they are never the primary focus of great games. This diluted design strategy comes from the noble aim of entertaining more players, but the result is inevitably bland compromise.

I'm the type that doesn't want handholding, but reasonably clear expectations about what needs to be done to get through the game are always a plus (that 'strong gameplay aesthetic' Rose is talking about, I suppose). I think experimentation and options are a good thing in many games, but Rose has some excellent points on game design in general.

Fewer Mechanics, Better Game [Gamasutra]

Well, it is a joke. And I don't want to say too much about it, because dissecting a joke always makes it unfunny. Part of it is this really silly idea, and part of it is this statement about how games are too hard and complicated. It's also a subtle reference to how some games are kind of patronizing toward the player, like too easy.

But I never set out to make it this way, it kind of turned into this with time. It started out as an attempt to make a game that spoiled the whole experience for you before you played it. Funnily enough, people really don't read instructions...

It's a nice little interview that touches on a lot of stuff (and no whining about the state of game blogs!).

Kian Bashiri (You Have To Burn The Rope) [IndieGames]

Historical scope - I want to expose students to the historical arc of RPGs, reflecting their origins and evolution. I realize I could spend weeks on mimesis, Tolkien, PnP Dungeons and Dragons, etc., but I'm keen to get them playing and studying electronic games as soon as possible.

Breadth - It's important that I provide students with a wide range of RPG games encompassing a variety of gameplay and design variations. The syllabus needn't be a "greatest hits" collection. A classic like Chrono Trigger may or may not make the list depending on how many other Square-developed SNES JRPG titles make the list ....

Impact - I want to assign games that have made a notable impact or illustrate important transitions in the evolution of the medium

RPG syllabus - the big list [The Brainy Gamer]

I see conferences and talks on the future of games and design, and the true integration and collaboration of games with other media, and many of these ideas are sound, genuinely intriguing, and some of them are even possible to implement. Yet, where are they?

There are so many fantastic ideas out there not getting realized ....

That's the big question. How do you take that plunge? I can't count how many people I've talked to who have great ideas for games, or who had better concepts for sub-par games that were eventually released. Why don't their games get made? Too daunting? Too many bosses? .

Why Do Good People Make Bad Games? [Gamasutra]

Starting this week, we'll be running a weekly Design Challenge. The Design Challenge is an exercise in becoming a game developer, asking you to look at games in a new way — from the perspective of a game creator, producer, marketer, businessperson, and so forth.

Each Wednesday I'll propose a design question. You'll have one week to answer it (see below for how to submit your answers). The following week, the best answers and the names of those who submitted them will be posted along with some commentary.

James Portnow's Design Challenge [GameCareerGuide]