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 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]

Here is a thought. When trying to create emotion in your players, tone down with the fixation on Hollywood, camera techniques and in-game narrative. It isn't our unique strength as a medium. Instead, explore what would happen if we, as designers, actively attempted to create and manipulate the social, psychological and physical environments of our players in order to induce artificial emotions. Toss the storyboards and scripts. Game design becomes an exercise not so dissimilar from the movie The Truman Show. You provide the carefully balanced system that sets up the appropriate physiological states and cognitive labels. The players react with predictable, measurable human drama.

OK, I'm not sure we really need to toss the storyboards in all cases, but experimentation with new ways of making the medium more powerful is never a bad thing. It's a really, really interesting piece and well worth sitting down to peruse.

Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment [Gamasutra]

Another month, another Lost Garden prototyping challenge: this time, the theme is 'god games' like Populous on a "smaller, more casual scale."

For those of you who wonder why there aren't more original games, this can be a great learning experience. The first lesson is that original design isn't usually constrained by technology. I've intentionally kept the engine requirements rather low tech. Instead, the biggest challenge becomes the mental shift from 'implementing a spec' to 'finding the fun in a new game system.' These are two very different skills. If you merely implement an original design, you'll often end up with unplayable garbage. Instead you have to dig for the fun.

And just in case you think nothing ever comes of this stuff, Danc recently posted a whole slew of SpaceCute prototypes. Being someone who's closest interaction with design anything is the final product, it's fun watching the evolution, even for something as low key and painfully cute as the Lost Garden designs. Maggie Greene

CuteGod: A Prototyping Challenge [Lost Garden]

Danc from Lost Garden has an interesting (and non-SpaceCute related) article up on Gamasutra talking about the whys and hows of game life cycles. "In 1994, encyclopedic game site MobyGames lists that 20 graphic adventure games were released. By 2002, the number of titles had plummeted to 3." It's all part of a much larger trend, and has a lot of components. This isn't anything new, mind you:

The 'genre life cycle' is merely the well established product life cycle concept applied to the game industry. This is business 101 for many companies, yet I find that it is a surprisingly fresh concept for many game developers.

Still a good read if you're interested in this sort of thing. Maggie Greene

The Circle of Life: An Analysis of the Game Product Lifecycle [Gamasutra via Lost Garden]

In the same vein as yesterday's "prototyping for fun and profit" (and their wonderfully low-fi, "we're game designers not artists" graphics), Danc over at Lost Garden has tossed up some tools for those of you who are good at designing game mechanics, but not so great at the whole "graphics" thing. The theory is use these building blocks, spending less time trying to make your game prototype attractive, more time making the game play fun. The set is in the same vein as the graphic set for his prototyping challenge, SpaceCute, so it's, well, cute. Painfully so, perhaps.

He outlines a couple of problems he sees with the way indie developers frequently deal with prototype graphics, including "MS Paint, in all its heavenly glory," mangling free graphics sets, sets that are hard to use, so he's put together a set based on "building blocks, not tile sets." He claims that if you can snap together Legos, you can manage to work with his PlanetCute prototyping tiles. Having met plenty of people who I'm not sure could snap together more complex Lego sets, I'm not so sure this is true, but one would hope they would not be designing games. Maggie Greene

Danc's Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Tiles [Lost Garden]

Last month, Danc over at Lost Garden, one of my favorite ways to spend a few hours reading stuff that just flies over my head, posted a "prototyping challenge" entitled SpaceCute. He says, "Over and over again, I've heard the sad tale that there are talented programmers lacking sexy graphics. I, on the other hand, can't program a lick. So here's a thought: I'll provide some quality graphics and a seed of a design idea. All you need to provide is a working prototype of the core game mechanic. " He's posting game prototypes as they come in, and the commentary on some entries is definitely worth reading.

I just think SpaceCute is, well, cute and am always interested in getting a look at how some of those maddeningly addictive indie games come to fruition. Maggie Greene

SpaceCute Prototyping Challenge [Lost Garden]