A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.<\/p>\n
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).<\/p>\n
[1] Kellee Santiago My own occasional commentary is in [ square brackets ]<\/p>\n Graphics over gameplay, AND gameplay over graphics don’t actually mean anything<\/p>\n Games break down into inputs and outputs. The game doesn’t exist without outputs, nor without inputs, so it’s meaningless to ask which is “most important”.<\/p>\n [Adam: I think you need to play ProgessQuest more… :P. Although I innately agree with this, or used to for many years, PQ eventually persuaded me that this was more of a personal self-delusion than a truism. Useful, but definitely NOT the full picture.]<\/p>\n You need to recognise that it’s not a game if there’s no ownership of inputs; you see something happen, and feel that’s it because of something you did.<\/p>\n Guitar Hero (GH) sucks because pressing a button when you have to isn’t owning any outputs, only owning an input. But … by giving you rock music when you press the butons, it DOES give you an output to own.<\/p>\n I had a sucky game that I was prototyping, and thought it was just really boring, I’d never pay for it, and then I added some cool graphics, and suddenly …it actually became really enjoyable. So I realised that graphics are actually essential.<\/p>\n I did a simple test where you could just jump high and low (small red ball on white bg).<\/p>\n All I did next was map every interaction to some kind of output.<\/p>\n Jumping made you squish narrowly, and when you move left and right a propeller on top rotates. Landing makes you squash out as you splat. Exponential decay on the animation of propeller.<\/p>\n All the gameplay rules are EXACTLY the same, but somehow it’s suddenly more compelling, and that’s what’s been blowing my mind.<\/p>\n [c.f. freecraft – try the early releases where no-one had created copyright-free art yet, so it was all just magenta blobs versus green blobs, and although the ruleset was standard Warcraft 2, the game itself sucked ass]<\/p>\n [c.f. Pixar’s very earliest animation work, the mini-story of the angle-poise lamp – look at how much inferred meaning humans can get out of the simplest of graphics, but they need SOME clues as to intent; in the pixar animation, the angle of the lamp, the speed of movement, and the direction of the light beam give you just enough to anthropomorphise it]<\/p>\n [1]<\/p>\n Its interesitng because I’ve seen a lot of designers wrestling with this, they feel the publisher isn’t creative, and doesn’t “get” the vision, and it’s because they’re showing the plain simple boxes and lineart version.<\/p>\n I think I see that there’s a certain amount of graphics that you need to even show your basic vision.<\/p>\n [2]<\/p>\n If you can’t see it, then it isn’t there.<\/p>\n The game developers are sort of projecting the gameplay, the feedback especially into the game that they know is going to be there, but isn’t there yet, because they have a library of this stuff in their head and know what it will be.<\/p>\n [1]<\/p>\n I’m wondering what is the level at which skinning the same mechanics does lead to a different experience, a different game.<\/p>\n What are we innovating on, how much is actually necessary innovation.<\/p>\n [2]<\/p>\n We talk about games as expression, and then go into the technical stuff. But I think a lot of the expression is simply “what you see and what you hear”.<\/p>\n Rez has very simple gameplay, not much expression, but the expression in fact IS how the visuals and audios all come together.<\/p>\n What if Call of Duty 3 (COD3) had Rez graphics? I realised that I would go from thinking it was boring and dull, to thinking that it was all about outputs, and that was when I started.<\/p>\n [3]<\/p>\n Much of the gameplay is seeing the difference between what you expected to happen when you did something, and what actually happened.<\/p>\n If you see exactly what you expected, then it’s dull.<\/p>\n If you see nothing like what you expected, then it’s ??? pointless??? [didnt hear this clearly]<\/p>\n
\nSection 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games<\/a>
\nSection 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
\nSection 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games<\/a><\/p>\nSpeakers<\/h4>\n
\n[2] John Mak
\n[3] Pekko Koskinen<\/p>\nSection 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs<\/h4>\n