March 13, 2012
CraftStudio appears to take the collaborative real-time 3-D world-building aspect of Minecraft, but adds to it the ability to script your own behaviors (also in real time, also collaboratively), so that instead of just building a world, you're building whatever sort of game you can imagine. (Currently in playable Alpha; also currently kickstarting indiegogoing.)
March 10, 2012
"The Gamification of Death": Michael Abbot (Brainy Gamer) provides a write-up of Margaret Robertson's Game Developers Conference talk. Previously a strident evangelist for the unlimited potential of games, her tone this year was more tempered: She and her company had been tasked with making a game to accompany a documentary about a woman whose death in her apartment went unnoticed for three years (with the TV on the whole time). This proved to be rather difficult. [more inside]
February 10, 2012
RAGE and the Circular Design Dilemma "RAGE is a game where the very mechanics and structure of the game exist not necessarily because they're fun, or because they make sense, but solely because they depend upon and reinforce each other."
September 8, 2011
September 2, 2011
A lengthy excerpt from Tom Bissell's new book, The Art and Design of Gears of War. As of today, it's only available if you shell out for the $150 Epic Edition.
August 30, 2011
The making of: Left 4 Dead Valve’s co-op take on undead horror redefined online play and scared us witless. Not bad for an apocalypse with just 30 zombies.
August 7, 2011
From Aberrance to Aesthetics: "[It is thought that] video games have a 'true nature,' a molten core established by accident among ancient folk games. Any attempt to extract, modify, or dispose of this core becomes a deluded perversion. Instead, the reasoning goes, we should seek to revisit and amplify the 'natural' features of games."
July 16, 2011
Chain World -- Religion or Holy War? Jason Rohrer's "Chain World" was the overwhelming audience favorite at the 2011 Game Design Challenge. This year's challenge was Bigger Than Jesus: games as religion. Rohrer's winning creation is a mod of Minecraft that exists on a single USB drive and is to be played by one person at a time who then passes it on to the next player without speaking of the game. The idea is to explore how human actions in a game world accrete into something very like a mythology. At the game's debut, Rohrer handed over the USB, more or less at random, to Jia Ji. He would be Chain World Player Two. And that's where the trouble began.
May 11, 2011
"To support games designed for longevity – that can be learned, played and shared for hundreds of years – we offer this challenge to any game designers, artists and imaginative people who also share this desire." Thousand dollar prize winner is to be chosen January 1st, 2012, and entrance is open until July 31 2011. Some recent entries here. Inspired by the Long Now Foundation and the X Prize.
May 3, 2011
Exploitationware and the Rhetoric of Gamification: in which it is proposed that the practice of 'gamification' is the domain of crass marketers and spineless consultants.
February 27, 2011
A common problem in game design is that of the difficulty curve. Ideally, the game gets harder as it progresses so that it keeps providing a challenge to the player. However, this is often not the case; as you progress through the game, you unlock more powers/abilities/weapons/etc., making the endgame comparatively trivial. Yahtzee, after considering this problem, came up with an interesting solution.
February 7, 2011
An interesting look at the failure of Deus Ex's second installment to engage through player agency, in anticipation of the upcoming new installment, Human Revolution. Related discussion in this interview, the value of choice.
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