“If you can’t design a non-digital game from a digital game…you don’t truly understand the nuances of the pure design underneath the art and…programming.” -Brathwaite & Schreiber

While you may take any digital game that interests you, I recommend working with a simpler game we have already looked at (such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Centipede) and convert that to a board game. These games are simple and easy to understand.

This article primarily focuses on PvE combat in RPGs, though its methods can be applied to PvP or other types of games.

Role playing games have a tremendous amount of content, each piece with multiple parameters that define what they do in combat. Damage dealt by a sword, bonus granted by a skill, total health of a level 23 bandit, etc. It’s not too hard to tune content when you look at a single game zone or a fixed character level – you can playtest that area and tweak values until the game feels right. However, trying to tune values for a giant world with 100 levels of content and multiple classes is much more complicated. How do you choose values for RPG content without playtesting and brute force tuning every type of character at every level?

I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.

I say "again" because I wrote about cloning a bit over a year ago. Since then, it's just continued to become a bigger issue in the game industry.

Last month I contracted what seemed to be a simple cold which progressed into a bronchial infection combined with asthma that knocked me out for three weeks.

It was really bad timing because around the same time, Raph Koster posted a blog bombshell when he said ‘Narrative is not a game mechanic’. A fair few commenters arose in support or ire. Posts flew about whether the meaning of narrative was too broad or limited, whether this was really about a limited formal view of games versus their possibilities, and so on. Exciting stuff, but I couldn’t really get into it.

I’m still recovering, but being ill has given me the chance to reflect and remember that there’s a reason that I don’t normally use the phrase ‘mechanics’. There's also a reason why I tend to dismiss broad narrativism. It’s because both of them are part of a pretend debate over correctness, and each – in their own way – is just circular flame-bait, an ever-burning meme that goes nowhere.

Gabe Zichermann (b. 1974) is an entrepreneur, author, highly rated public speaker and gamification thought leader. He is the chair of the Gamification Summit and Workshops, and is co-author of the book “Game-Based Marketing” (Wiley, 2010) where he makes a compelling case for the use of games and game mechanics in everyday life, the web and business. Gabe is also a board member of StartOut.org and facilitator for the NYC chapter of the Founder Institute. A native of Canada and resident of NYC, Gabe frequently muses about games and the world at http://Gamification.Co

The WebSocket protocol has applications beyond plain vanilla web development.  I will explain how the protocol works, how to implement your own server and share some insights I had along the way. Before we get down and dirty, I will explain what I’ve been doing with it.

ROM Hacks make the process of developing a functional Sonic game with unique art, enemies, and modifications much easier, since the game engine and basic mechanics are already functional. However, if the game requires a different game engine, modifying existing low-level assembly may be inappropriate, and some game designers might choose to program their own unique game engine. The physics of a game engine are rules that describe how to transform the player's input (either in the form of buttons, keyboard, or even a mouse if the designer feels inclined) into appropriate changes in the position of the sprites in the game (such as the Sonic sprite, or alternatively, how enemy sprites will respond). These physics guides will hopefully make the process of simulating the rules used in Sonic games easier.

Since the rules themselves are independent of how they are implemented, many people choose programming languages such as Java, C, C++, Python, or a Lisp dialect to implement game physics. In addition, people can choose to use more specialized applications like Flash, Game Maker, or a Clickteam program like Multimedia Fusion 2.

Hopefully, these guides will provide adequate information to facilitate implementation.

I love stories. My chief hobby is reading. I was formally trained as a writer, not as a game designer (there wasn’t really any formal training for game design I got started, but that’s another story). I think most game stories are not very good. And I quite enjoy games with narrative threads pulling me through them. When I find a game with a good story, I frequently prefer to the story to the actual game! So please keep that in mind as you read: I love story.
Narrative in a game is not a mechanic. It’s a form of a feedback.

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities

There will be no escaping games in 2012. From the Olympics to hit shows on TV, lucrative games on your mobile phone to innovative live events, games are more a part of our everyday lives than they’ve ever been.
This briefing document looks ahead to the key issues that can help guide your strategy in 2012. And, since the gaming world evolves fast, we’ve drawn some concrete examples of these trends from front-runners in 2011, so you can get to grips with what they mean in practice. 

Boss fights are the linch pin of your entire combat experience, possibly your entire game, as one bad experience is all it takes to bring your game to a screeching halt. Something so important, so integral, demands effort and attention to detail, but for the majority of projects they are relegated to the very end. Why?

Cut the Rope is an immediate favorite for anyone who plays it. It’s as fun as it is adorable. So we had an idea: let’s make this great game available to an even bigger audience by offering it on the web using the power of HTML5.

To do this, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab (the creators of the game) and the specialists at Pixel Lab to bring Cut the Rope to life in a browser. The end result is an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts.

You can play the HTML5 version of Cut the Rope at: www.cuttherope.ie.

Sometimes you’re asked to design for the untestable scenario. For instance, design a system for 10,000 players to asynchrously interact in a persistent competitive world with progression mechanics that plays out over 3 months.

For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context

My previous articles were about system design at a conceptual level, focusing on goals and best practices for system designers. This article gives an example of how to put those principles into practice. To demonstrate, I’ll walk through the character stat systems for one of the games I did system design for: Dungeon Siege 2. I’ll describe how its systems work, why we set things up the way we did, and how we did the math to translate our goals into content.

You know what my job is? Oh, sure, there’s a lot of stuff about “building relationships” and “communication” and “facilitation” and “sanity checking,” but really, my job usually involves apologizing

Okay, after a little bit of basic background on class vs. skill based RPG systems yesterday, I’m going to talk about some of the advantages, disadvantages, and general design features of class-based RPGs

Is a video game still a video game if there's no... video? Designer Adam Henriksson grabs that question by the horns with Pockit, a game console concept that has no graphics whatsoever. Instead, it's a Wii-like motion-sensing wand that "encourages everyone to be physical and have a reason to break norms," he writes. Rather than waving the wand around in front of a screen -- which is the only way you get to see what your wand is representing--the Pockit moves that aspect of the game experience into your own mind's eye. Whether you've configured the Pockit to be "running" a swordfighting game or something else, the point is that the players are focusing their attention on each other in real life, not virtualized avatars.

MMOClash reports a financial analyst downgraded Activision Blizzard stock from "buy" to "neutral" based on an online survey with 381 gamer participants. Now personally I wouldn't buy Activision Blizzard shares; their main cash cow is aging, and the games business is extremely volatile. But I do have doubts whether accurate financial forecasts can be achieved by asking a few hundred gamers.

I recently attended a talk by a gamification proponent who presented a fragmented and ill structured theory on what gamification can bring to a product. He arrived at the right conclusions, but due to the long and winded road he took there. the audience was generally unwilling to accept the fine finale of his talk. In the end, he dismissed gamification as the surface-scratching marketing tool that it currently is, proposing a focus on “game thinking” instead. Because he failed to come up with a convincing definition of that phrase, I thought I should step in and deliver one. Mine is based on “design thinking”[1], a term popular in design theory. I’m quite familiar with design theory because it was the foundation of all our research at the university department I researched, taught and worked at before entering the exciting world of the games industry.

What can architecture teach us about game design?

In this article, I’ll look at architecture to see what elements can be incorporated into game design.  Architecture is a large field, and as a part of design there is already a lot of overlap with game design, so I’m going to focus on a style of architecture known as organic architecture.  This article of course can only scratch the surface of either organic architecture or architecture as a field, but will hopefully give a taste that will inspire further exploration.

In the continuing saga of one peron's mission to turn the d20 system into a classless system, we find ourselves with a question of balance. We've got a foundation laid, let's take the next steps toward our goal.

I promised some talk about balancing, but we have a few odds and ends first.

Ein Spiel braucht interaktive Momente, um seiner Definition gerecht zu werden. Die Erzeugung eines Spielsystems aber, eines Agierens in mathematischen Möglichkeiten also, ist eine sehr abstrakte Angelegenheit. Um die Einstiegshürden zu senken, die Befremdnis zu verringern und damit massenkompatibler zu werden, muss es sich an bekannte Medien anschmiegen und Gekanntes, Geschätztes und Verstandenes übernehmen. Was liegt da näher, als das Medium Film in das Computerspiel einzubauen. Leider verträgt sich die sekündlich getimte und perspektivisch eingeschränkte Form des Filmes nicht sonderlich gut mit dem auf Freiheit und interaktiver Errechnung scheinbar zufälliger Ereignisse getrimmten Wesen eines Spieles.

Taking a more playful approach to your fanbase can help drive increased engagement and traffic for your fan page. One technique is the use of game mechanics. The goal of game mechanics is to keep customers coming back and doing what you want them to do through incentives and rewards.

Bennett Foddy detailed the mechanics of addiction as it relates to game design to the audience at Develop Liverpool today. “For game developers, addictiveness is a design goal,” he said, before admitting that an addictive game isn’t necessarily bad. “But not everyone addicted to videogames is enjoying themselves, and lives can go awry,” he warned.

What are critical hits? How do they work? Typically there is some percent chance to crit which causes an attack to deal some percentage extra damage. Commons values are in the ranges 1-30% chance to crit and 35-300% extra damage. In an RPG this works as you’d expect. For each swing of the sword you roll the magic random number generator dice and check for a crit1.

Team Fortress 2 has an interesting crit system2. Guns have a 2% base chance to crit which temporarily increases as the player deals damage. Slow firing guns (shotgun) check for crit with each shot similar to an RPG sword. Rapid fire guns (uzi) check once per second and crit in two second bursts.

We live in a bold, new era in game monetization. A full-production desktop game that is free-to-play makes on the order of $37.5 million every year. Games companies that see less than 5% of their users ever spend a cent make almost $1 Billion a year in revenue. Entirely new ways of selling games are being devised every day. How should a game developer pick a monetization method in these crazy times? To help us understand what really drives consumers to open up their wallets for their favorite games, I suggest we look back to one of the progenitors of micro-transactions, Magic: The Gathering(MTG from here on out).At first glance, it would seem to be easy to answer the question “What is the monetization method of MTG?”  ”Simple,” you might say, “They sell packs of cards,” which is true of course, but there is a lot of nuance rolled up in those packs of cards.

The approach to game design in these articles is analytical and methodical. It’s best suited to games with a lot of content, like RPGs or strategy games. These articles are more about the hour-to-hour experience than the minute-to-minute experience, so they won’t apply to many types of games. My apologies if this material doesn’t directly translate to your work – I hope you can still find them valuable.

My sense is that brand managers are approaching games in the wrong way. A few years ago they were all into creating virtual worlds but that didn’t really work out. More recently they went through a phase of creating social games, but again no luck. Now they’re keen to commission digital agencies or game developers to create gamified sites or software for brands, which will inevitably become coupon schemes, badges and leader boards.

The vast majority of these projects are utter failures because they end up creating vapid digital services with no soul. The ones that do succeed often do so accidentally (for example, because they were unexpectedly fun). Games are a cultural product, and like any other culture there is a line where commercial relationships become nakedly self-serving, and no customer finds that sexy.

Perhaps the branding industry should consider branding games rather than gamifying brands instead, if only for the reason that it’s more likely to work.

At the Games Developer's Conference GDC 2011, Raph gave a very good (if long) talk. And I especially liked the part where he talked about incomplete information as a game mechanic (the "Strategy guides" bookmark at the link above). He makes fun about the people who say that reading a strategy guide, for example for a World of Warcraft raid, "isn't really cheating. Because it doesn't really tell me how to play the game. I still have to tap the button in my synchronized swimming exercise at the right time." He then points out that incomplete information is an important game mechanic of many games, like Poker or Stratego. Or even Scrabble, where he cites the LA Times about an online Scrabble Cheat-o-Matic site which gets 120,000 page views a day since you can play Scrabble on Facebook.

Over the years, my job gave me the priviledge of meeting amazing people. People who had a deep impact on my career, on my knowledge, on my personalty, and on what I am as a whole.

That must be why I am so fond of stories about game development that focus on people. The technology keeps changing, but the motivation that drives it remains. The people who shaped one way or another what our industry looks like today are for me an endless source of inspiration and motivation.

So I decided to share with you a few books I recently read, both have the same focus on the people behind the technology rather than on the technology itself.

The gist of this article is the claim that Second Life failed because it doesn't fill a consumer need.  Brilliant -- welcome to 2007.  Actually, maybe 2003, since this is basically the same criticism that many of us had when Second Life launched (do we really need a Metaverse?) and the reason the more game-focused set of us always had a little trouble liking Second Life.  It seemed like a very cool tool that was not particularly fun to use.  Without a game mechanic that lended purpose to your presence on the platform, what Second Life offered seemed a lot like an avatar-populated uncurated 3-D art gallery.

As a bunch of “old-school” RPG fans hang out here, we’re accustomed to griping about how “dumbed down” RPGs have become over the years.

But it’s not just our favorite genre. As much as we complain about RPGs becoming first-person shooters, first-person shooters aren’t what they used to be, either.

To illustrate this point, this excellent video by kmooseman

I’ve been the latest victim of the Minecraft bug of late. I must admit this game is pretty amazing in its simplicity. It’s so very basic yet very addictive. I could totally see modern gamers passing it up because of the graphics or the playstyle, as I almost did myself. But the reality is that it is worth a try. I’ve learned a lot from the game, here’s just a few things

I don't mean to create an instructional reference like Jesse Schell’s game design lenses or The 400 Project. What I'm aiming for is less about function or theory and more about inspiration, the sort of thing that might trigger an idea or insight, or maybe not. Light enough that you can try whatever a card advises without thinking about it too much, or simply let it drift in your mind while you do other things. 

See if this sounds familiar to you:

To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game.

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille.

I’ve found myself wondering about “gamification” with increasing frequency these last few months as various articles appear online to denounce it. What is it, exactly? And is it really as bad as they all say? What follows is a brief exploration of the concept and a look at its applications.  At the end, I offer my opinion on whether gamification really is bad, or merely misunderstood.

Outside of the recent flurry associated with Google+, the one term that has been top of mind throughout the digital space recently is gamification. Gamification is a term used to describe organizations using game mechanics to drive engagement in traditionally non-gaming products. There are examples of gamification everywhere in our daily lives and many brands are integrating game mechanics in unique and compelling ways all with the purpose of driving user engagement.

Below are 15 examples of Gamification and how brands are capitalizing on the trend.

I'm lucky enough not to be drowning in email, so keeping my inbox clean doesn't require zen-like discipline. But for everyone else out there for whom "Inbox Zero" is a fantasy at best, there's a handy web-app called "The Email Game," which uses clever game mechanics to -- as I previously put it when we first covered the product -- "make email your bitch, not the other way around." But the game's creators haven't been sitting on their laurels since then: they've just released an updated version of the game with a better design.

Gamification is bullshit.

I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically.

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Play is nature's learning engine, says games researcher and author Aaron Dignan. In other words, we're hardwired to enjoy games - they're addictive, skill-building, and satisfying. So the question is: How can we integrate game concepts into our work lives to help us push ideas forward? In this talk, Dignan walks us through the principles of creating a great game and suggests ways that we might use them to overcome email exhaustion, spice up workaday meetings, and more.

The larger man spoke. He gestured while doing so. “You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era.

Why would one coding team drive itself to the edge of exhaustion to create a fully fledged video game—one featuring badgers—in the course of a single weekend? Why would 20? We sent our man in Australia to a 48 hour "game jam" to find out, and he came back with an amazing 24,000 word answer. If reading this piece doesn't make you want to whip out a laptop and do something creative, you may be dead inside. Here, then, is part one of our three part epic, covering the game jam's first evening; parts two and three will follow over the next two days.

The story most of you are talking about is story telling being told in text, cut scenes, voiceover, and machinima. None of that is a game, its other media squeezed in between what is a game. Games have emergent stories, or what I prefer to call drama. That's the thing that happens when you are the last counter terrorist trying to defuse the bomb in counterstrike. Quake, and Doom had drama, modern AAA games have Story telling.

Whenever I visit a developer, I always ask for a tour. Games aren't wished into existence; real people who hang out in real places create the titles we play, and I like to see where that happens. Unfortunately, the office buildings all begin to blend together. They're often dark spaces, they're often covered with action figures and other pieces of geek ephemera, and you'll often see some sad sack developer sleeping under a desk.

But what if you're a tiny outfit who can't afford a fancy office tower—where do you create your next masterpiece? I contacted independent game studios that I respect and asked them to take a few minutes and a camera and show off their workspaces. Some were enthusiastic, others were hesitant, and many seemed almost ashamed; they all assumed that everyone else had better space in which to create games.

Spielen ist Lernen – auch wenn es auf den ersten Blick schwerfällt, in dem über 350 Millionen mal heruntergeladenen Casual Game Angry Birds mehr als nur Zeitvertreib zu sehen. Und den suchen nicht wenige von uns:  Fast jeder zweite deutsche Internetnutzer besucht Online Gaming-Seiten. Knapp 40 Prozent der Smartphone Besitzer nutzen ihr Handy zum Spielen (comscore 2011). Kein Wunder, dass mehr und mehr darüber nachgedacht wird, den Gebrauch von Produkten oder Services für Nutzer mit Erfolgsfaktoren aus dem Spielesektor attraktiv und belohnend zu gestalten. Das Zauberwort heisst Gamification.

Tomonobu Itagaki spent the better part of two decades at Tecmo and Team Ninja, where his major projects included developing the Dead or Alive fighting game series and making sure you knew the competition (Tekken in particular) wasn't any good. He left the developer several years ago and is now working on action game Devil's Third at Valhalla Game Studios. In other words, he's no longer in the fighting game business and therefore no longer trash talks the competition -- and it's exactly that which Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada misses.

Games as learning tools are in my mind A LOT these days. And so it happens with this gamefi-learni-cation happening all around that the topic is in many peoples’ minds. A question that comes up when I have conversations around the topic (which happens pretty often) is what are effective strategies to design a game for learning. The obvious answer is that games for learning are first and foremost games and in order to make them you should take all the steps you would take to create a fun game. A rule of thumb I apply whenever I design a game for the classroom is to ask myself whether or not a kid would play this again outside of the school context, say at home with friends. If the answer to that question is NO - then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Gamification has come under some fire from gamers recently, specifically since this post from Ian Bogost (since republished in The Atlantic). It could be the beginning of a backlash against the use of video games and game culture in a wide variety of spaces. Bogost is ruthless in his attack on the corporate world's foray into gaming, but what of serious games and the broader concepts around gamification and game-based learning in education? Where does this leave the push by schools and educators who have been exploring the use of games and game-based learning as a way of engaging students, teaching twenty-first century skills and finding ways to make the technologically-saturated lives of our children relevant in the classroom?

Gamification is a polarizing and divisive topic with many proponents and vocal skeptics and cynics. But it is not bullshit. Gamification is real and its benefits are tangible. Gamification is here to stay.

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

Bernie Maddoff is in jail for the next 150 years. He misled investors with a Ponzi scheme, a scam in which you promise people a high return on investment, which you pay not with any real business, but with the money new investors give you. In real life, this is fraud, and if you are caught you will go to jail for it. In a game, for example if I offer you a dodgy deal for a street in Monopoly counting on the fact that you are bad with numbers, this is part of the game and I won't go to jail for it. It's just play money. But what of situations that are in between?

Okay, you may not think two full articles to be all that brief, but considering the scope and significance of the series, this seems pretty well abridged to me. G4TV has a two-part history of the series

I’m a big fan of your work and reader of your blog. You probably don’t remember me but I briefly met you at GDC Online last year. I was looking for Dr. Richard Bartle, who I did find and conducted an interview with.
A few months ago I released the interview on my Youtube Partner account but forgot to mention to you that I had done so. I thought you might be interested in it.

Our indie team, Kindling Games, is currently developing a game for Windows Phone 7. We’re in the final throes of getting this thing out the door and the other day we had this simple, well proven idea for generating a little more revenue and adding a different dimension to our game. For a small fee, you would be able to customize your rainbow duder (we need a better name) with a few skins and also be able to customize your levels. For example, you’d pick up a Zeus skin and a tiny Zeus sits on top of your rainbow cloud and extra lighting particle effects rain down terror on the townspeople. Essentially, the purchase would include a small bit of additional functionality along with the cosmetic change. We’re well beneath the maximum package size so we thought this would be a great way to add extra content and some extra fun! After having this idea, I had a flash of sudden realization that the Windows Phone 7 does not support micro-transactions. Arrrrrggggh!!!

The role of a visionary on a creative project is an essential and demanding one.  Many companies that consistently produce great products owe much of their success to their visionaries;  Apple has Jobs,  Pixar has Lasseter,  Nintendo has Miyamoto, etc.  But visionaries are nothing without talented teams to realize their vision.  Vision needs to be communicated, reinforced, inspected and adapted to the emerging reality of the game.  This is the visionary’s fundamental responsibility to the team.

When games mix they can create exciting new experiences, but many mixes just don’t work. Rather than being enhanced by their interaction, these games pull on each other, leaving the overall experience to be one of dysnergy, the opposite of synergy.

Perhaps the game design has forgotten the importance of the player’s role. Role is not a marketing issue. It is how players understand your game and why it's awesome

Syp chimes in on the SWTOR morality debate with a very optimistic comment: "Plus, wouldn’t it be really cool if BioWare makes these choices and stories so compelling that it tears people away from grinding light/darkside points to do what they want to do?" Yes, Syp, that would be really cool. But, from my personal experience with gamers and developers, that isn't going to happen.

A "perfect" story for me would be one in which good and evil are so perfectly balanced that my natural choices would end me up somewhere in the grey area of the morality spectrum. That is where I see most people in real life ending up if judged by a jedi system of beliefs. I certainly am no un-emotional jedi of pure goodness and control over mind and body.

Unless Bioware adds grey morality gear to the game, which isn't planned, and frankly unlikely, following a grey story will disqualify players from wearing any morality gear. And I expect there to be some very cool morality gear which you can only wear if you are at the extreme ends of the scale. 99 out of 100 gamers will thus go into "let's optimize the fun out of this" mode. They won't even *read* the possible responses to some moral dilemma. They'll just automatically chose the one which is marked as giving the right points for the cool gear they are after. And that is where the story-based MMORPG gameplay will utterly fail.

The free-to-play online game service Gameforge now has 300 million registered users.

Wooga CEO Jens Begeman has revealed the percentage revenue split of his company's social game income, with the unexpected revelation that his audience is far more interested in saving time than buying customisation and decoration.

The finalists for this year's Games Media Awards have been revealed ahead of October's ceremony in London.

Organisers have whittled down the list of finalists from thousands of nominations, with 17 magazines, 20 websites, podcasts and blogs, and 26 writers up for an award, with the winners to be chosen by a panel of industry figures.

The formula for the perfect game may be an area of hot discussion, but most would argue that games that are easy to get into and difficult to put down goes along the right lines. Players' early experience of a game is critical: this is the period in which they're making up their minds whether to devote more time, and often money, to the rest of it. 

So how do we make games with a polished early experience? Let's take some lessons from a game which I think does it incredibly well, PopCap's Plants Vs Zombies. 

Games are made of verbs. Run, jump, punch, crouch. Hand held controllers are able to simulate the input of the player to use those verbs in a rather precise way, be it on/off or analog. And as developers, designing around verbs is a pretty straightforward affair which we have been doing since the first game was played. But when it gets to adverbs, the emotional variables of a verb, neither the controller or developer seems to be aware of what to do with them beyond pure visuals.

Enter motion controls. While initially it is the verbs we assign to the gestures, such as swing a sword, we quickly find out that they just don’t quite match up the crisply defined input of a controller.  Motion Controls also lack a tactile sense of feedback in many cases, making all those verbs feel hollow when we don’t feel the physical reaction. It is a fun gimmick, but we quickly grow tired of the theatrics and plug our plastic hands back into the machine.

So if verbs aren’t best used for motion controls, how can we use them as adverbs and adjectives?

So the announcement that in Diablo III players will be able to buy any item in the game from other players for either in-game currency or real money caused some heads to explode and people to discuss the evil of "pay to win". Apparently nobody noticed, or at least chose to keep mum about, the fact that this is exactly like EVE Online. And the EVE fans have claimed for years that this isn't evil RMT, because you buy the items from other players, not from the game company. As usual MMO commentary is highly tribal, thus if one person's favorite game company does something it is a force of good, while if another game company does exactly the same it is a force of evil.

Nevertheless I find the system in Diablo III interesting, because it is safe to assume that a lot more people will play Diablo III than EVE. The more people participate in a market, the closer the actual prices on the market reflect what could be called the "true value". And I think this true value will be an eye-opener. And that is a good thing.

Usability testing is on the increase led by companies like PlayableGames and Vertical Slice in the UK, and Microsoft Games Studios having offered their gameplay lab services to their exclusive developers for Xbox from before 20031. Yet it can be regarded as expensive, troublesome to organise and just a distraction from making features for a game product.

It doesn’t have to be.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

Games are becoming more Web-like, and the Web is becoming more game-like. If you need proof of this, you have only to look at Yahoo Answers. Random questions are posed, the top answer is chosen, and credibility points are given to the winner. It’s a ranking system that accumulates and unlocks more and more features within the system. It works because of the psychology of achievement and game mechanics and thus encourages interaction. This raises the question, what can a Web designer learn from games, or — more specifically — video games?

Game Developer Magazine

Rivs from A High Latency Life might be best-known for his… erm… provocative pictures he likes to put up with each of his posts.  I gave him one of the most fun assignments I could think of: To pick the worst TV show to make an MMO from — and then speculate how he would make it work as a game.

When Syp asked me to write a post about the Worst TV show to make an MMO from, and how the mechanics would work. I thought long and hard, oh I thought of cartoons. Maybe a Carebear MMO, that would really empty out WoW, but the fact is I loved a lot of the older TV shows. How cool would a Thundercats MMO would be? This was going to be harder than I thought.

OK, so this basically gives me permission to ramble on a bit about how games evolve over time. Designers can stop reading now, there's nothing here you don't already know...

I suppose, as I'm stating the obvious, I should begin by pointing out that there are four kinds of changes that happen to games.

I am fascinated by economic theory. Time is the ultimate resource, and what are we, then, if not economists dealing in the exchange of fun for time and money. I find there are many parallels to game design, and the tools and theories they provide are a great comfort to me. So when my good friend told me to read Predictably Irrational, I pounced on that book like a hungry hungry hippo.

The book is about Behavioral Economics. A relatively new field in the study of economics, and it starts with the assumption that human beings are not as rational as traditional economics likes to think we are, and in fact, we are irrational to the point of being—wait for it—predictably irrational (herp). It goes on to detail several major points of irrationality, and then backs them up with field experiments that are almost as much fun to read about as they are edifying.

Of the myriad of topics, that ones that stuck with me the most were, no surprise, the ones that provided clear insight into common game design problems. The topics of relativity, the power of zero, the social verses market exchange, and the power of ethics and cheating all showed me new ways to think about common problems, and I’m sure there is even more insight just out of my minds eye, waiting to be tapped. But insight for insights sake is pointless, so it’s time to share my thoughts with you. Let’s start with how the value of things is not as simple as it appears…

Normally, if I was contracted to do an MMO design, I would almost entirely ignore the “world” and focus on “making the most fun game possible.” A common successful approach to making a fun game is to divide and conquer: first you make the game fun in tiny 30-to-60 second chunks. When you’re confident that the lowest-level thing you do in your game is fun to do over and over and over, then you step back and make a fifteen-minute “fun loop” (or some similar time window). Thus in WoW, killing a monster might take 30 seconds, but completing a quest takes 15 minutes. These are loops: you are rewarded for completing them and are then pushed toward doing the loop again.

This is a very effective way to make a highly directed game. I’ve used it before with success, and I will no doubt use it again in the future. I’m not knocking this method. But it’s not a good approach if you want the game to have more “world” in it.

Designing the boat level for Resistance 3 was an interesting challenge in many ways.  It’s a short traversal on-rails level (well, sort of on-rails) wedged between two high-action core-combat parts of a first person shooter.  Thus, our goal was for it to be a break in the pacing of the whole game that focused more on emotional and visual storytelling.  We needed to make sure that the whole level team was on the same page about the player experience we would be attempting to create when we started full production on the level.

I don't play golf. But if I did, and I'd tell my colleagues at the office that I spent €250 on a golf club, they would nod wisely and say that this is what a decent golf club costs. But if I told them I spent 2,500 hours on the driving range training, they would think I'm crazy. Online players think differently. They'd nod wisely if I told them I spent 2,500 hours in an online game, and think I'm crazy because I spent €250 on World of Tanks. I didn't spend 2,500 hours in WoT, but I did 2,500 battles, so well over 250 hours, which at less than 1€ per hour still is cheaper than most other forms of commercial entertainment.

First, the Eve playerbase feels both empowered and angry. They feel very much as though they should have a voice in how the game is run. CCP has not disagreed with this, and their “Council of Stellar Management” player advisory council is currently winging its way to Iceland, at CCP’s expense (and knowing the expense of last-minute airline reservations, more than cancelling any benefit from selling virtual monocles). We’ve seen player protests in MMOs before, but this is the first overt player riot - enabled in part by Eve’s own strengths of being a unitary server game so that if, say, someone decides it’s a good idea to shoot up a statue commemorating the in-game NPC leaders as a political gesture, it can get legs.

CCP Zulu (aka Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, Eve’s senior producer)

The investment of money in EVE should not give you an unfair advantage over the investment of time. The CSM, under NDA, has been presented with CCP‘s plans for continued evolution of the business model and agrees that nothing they saw breaks this principle. CCP has committed to sharing their plans with the CSM on this front on an ongoing basis.

The Mittani (aka Alexander Gianturco, Eve’s senior politician)

We believe that the situation that has unfolded in the past week has been a perfect storm of CCP communication failures, poor planning and sheer bad luck.  Most of these issues, when dealt with in isolation, were reasonably simple to discuss and resolve, but combined they transformed a series of errors into the most significant crisis the EVE community has yet experienced.

Holy god.. that trailer makes me relive so many horrible memories.. yet is just so awesome.

For those of you who dont know, Tommy and i were both documented by a tiny 2 person team called Blink Works on and off for about a year during the middle-end of development of Super Meat Boy. We met them at GDC the year we lost at the IGF.. they approached us after the loss and told us they were thinking about doing a short documentary about indie games. They had been talking to many indie devs and wanted to do something that could show the world the life of an indie game designer, we agreed and they followed us back to santa cruz. For the next 9+ months of development our lives were peppered with their cameras and almost sickeningly kind and gentle nature (they are Canadian).