GDC Vault – Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design] is a link that takes you to the GDC Vault where you can watch a full video of the presentation, with the slides side by side, for free.
Of course, you didn’t need that, right? Because you already paid to get access to the utterly awesome GDC Vault.
There are a couple more free talks released today as well, including the AI rant and an inside look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can check out all the free talks here.

WoW Should Have Died

Let me put it another way: our industry’s “common sense” tells us that WoW should have flopped when it launched. It was the most expensive launch fiasco we’d ever seen!

Common sense says you don’t recover from mega-sized technical disasters. As evidence, we have a long slew of failed games before and after WoW, which we write off as “Oh, of course they failed, their launch was poor.” We still believe that getting the launch right is critically important to a AAA-level MMO’s success.

And start calling them Design Tools. Docs get appended, while Tools are put aside as needs change. Design docs are necessary, but their definition is both antiquated and inadequate to the task they provide. In fact, their task–as tools–is threefold, and it worries me that none of this was explained to me.
A game designers job goes through three major periods: figuring out what the hell you are making, getting the team on board with the initial idea, and then managing the vision as the game is redesigned (like, a lot – a LOT a lot); similarly, your documentation, as the project goes through these stages, serves three purposes: extrapolation, communication, and collation.

MMOs are games where you play combat primarily in the user interface rather than the game world.
I think this is best realised in the classic ‘standing in the fire’ error of new raiders: essentially people stand in the fire because it is an element of playing in the game world, where levelling-up has trained those players to instead play in the interface. Combat is in the cooldowns; you watch timers, health bars, debuff bars, and only when you get to raiding or the more ambitious small group dungeons do you need to start looking into the game world too, in order to step out of the fire, dodge the laser beam, jump over the furious shrew of ruin.

In 1960, Milton Bradley published »The Game of Life«: a capitalist wet dream of a board game, won by the lucky one who retired richest. Today, »gamification« vendors take Milton Bradley seriously. From losing weight to saving Africa, from watching TV to matching DNA sequences: there’s nothing that couldn’t be made more fun by adding points, badges, and other elements from video games. At least that’s the selling proposition.

I’ve always had a strong (though not exclusive) achiever streak in computer games (by both Jon Radoff and Richard Bartle‘s classifications). Course many early games were all about racking up the points in a bid to ascend to the glory of the High Score Table (and the resulting dilemma of whether to enter your actual initials to proclaim your great skill to the world, or a hilarious three-letter profanity. BUM, tee hee!) and you didn’t have much of a choice over being a completionist. You had to shoot all the titular Space Invaders, gobble all the pills in Pac-Man and knock out every brick to get Thro’ The Wall to progress to the next level (of more Invaders, pills or bricks).

Ha, got your attention, eh?  But this is actually an important topic, of the 'reality is broken' variety.  Like the fact that we're obsessed over sexting and other digital phenomena related to sex, yet we have done little to improve sex education in this country.  In fact, we have vilified and cut funding to Planned Parenthood and other organizations that save people's lives by providing them critical information that affects them physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
Games, however, are so complex that it is difficult to anticipate exactly how players will optimize a game until after release, once thousands bang away at the game and share their ideas with each other online. Often, designers don’t even understand their own games until they finally see them in the wild.

Courtesy of former Origin programmer Bill Randolph, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Joe Garrity of the Origin Muesum, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present four documents — which have been broken out into over thirty images — which discuss some of the technical details of Ultima 6.
Specifically, the documents — all of which appear to be internal documents from Origin Systems — discuss the conversation syntax of the game and its technical implementation, the object design of the game, and the in-house map editor that Origin developers used to construct the Ultima 6 game world.

About a year ago an idea occurred to me (yes, it happens occasionally): wouldn’t it be great to make a game, and I mean a real AAA title, that was educational? That you could really learn something from? Of course we’ve all played games like Sim City and Civilization but one could argue that the potential learning involved there is more the means than the goal itself. And improved reflexes by playing first person shooters isn’t quite what I mean either.

It’s a sign of the times that when, a few years ago, I said “I design videogames” people would smile, nod and either look for something or someone else to talk to.  This does still happen at times but it’s now become more common for people to say “hey, that’s cool.  Bet it’s a fun job!”  I confirm that it is.  More recently still, and people have started to then go on and ask me exactly what it is that I do.  And that’s where I stumble a bit, because it’s not easy to quickly define.

Last month I had the privilege of presenting at the Games for Health Conference.[1] It was a big gathering of people that want to use games to positively change the world. However, most of attendees were from the the education or healthcare space. While everyone knew they were on to something powerful, there were also a lot of misconceptions on how gaming works as a motivator.

Being a good combat designer requires understanding the meaning and significance of both depth and breadth in your designs. To put it simply: depth is the Knowledge of How, and breadth is the Knowledge of Why. But what does this mean?

How do I perform that move? Why should I use this move? How come I need meter to do this move? How do I build meter? Why should I build meter?

Keybote by Jesse Schell about Game Caharcter Design at the Unity Unite 10 Conference

Dr Richard A. Bartle, Senior Lecturer and Visiting Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK is often quoted by, well pretty much anyone involved with gamification.

Dr Richard A. Bartle, Senior Lecturer and Visiting Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK is often quoted by, well pretty much anyone involved with gamification... And I'm just about to disagree with him. I just read Will Gamification be Ubiquitous in 5 Years? on Gametuned, and although I believe Dr. Bartle makes a few good points, he's missing some important new developments. Either that, or his and my definition of gamification just don't agree.

In June 2010, as the world waited for news on the release of Portal2, Valve announced that making games is hard.  Everyone inside the industry knows this, but to gamers and journalists alike this seemed to come as a surprise. Partly because of disappointment that a game they were looking forward to wasn’t coming out for a bit longer, and partly because Valve is an industry leader. For them to put their hands up and say “hey, this ain’t so easy” made people think: “if they find it hard, what about everybody else?”.

Well, yup, everybody else finds it hard as well. But why? Surely we just take the last game we made and stick some new levels and graphics in it? Or just sit around all day playing the game until one day we decide to release it?

Unfortunately, it’s not like that at all. But why not?

Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit.

I was recently given the opportunity to join the BigDoor team and a few of their clients up in a beautiful cabin in the evergreen forests of Washington to do a jam session on gamification.  *Thanks Keith, Jeff and team!*

Leading the session was co-founder of ShuffleBrain Amy Jo Kim, who has been gamifying systems before there was even a term for it.  Remember eBay seller ratings?  Yup, it incorporated game elements and she was a part of that.  Rock Band, The Sims, Bejewelled 2?  Uhh... yeah, she helped in the design of those games too.  She is an awesome speaker and I highly recommend you go to one of her talks if you have a chance.

Sometimes called the “game mechanic” or the “30 seconds of fun,” the core loop is the series of actions the player will perform over and over again in the heart of gameplay. The core loop of Gears of War might be: 1) Encounter bad guys and take cover 2) Move to a good attack position 3) Kill the bad guys using a selection of your weapons 4) Re-arm and move on.


Everything else – vehicles in a shooter, dialogue in an RPG, cutscenes, minigames, QTE’s, set-pieces, traversing an empty environment, etc – it’s all pacing for the core loop. If any of these elements were solid enough to stand on their own, they would be their own genre. Sometimes they are, like vehicles in a driving game, but often they aren’t, like dialogue or QTE’s.

Aside from an ugly name, thinness of gameplay, sameness of ideas (rewards, levels, badges and points) and a lack of any strong examples of what it is supposed to be, what’s the most fundamental issue that gamification faces?

The basic idea of gamification is that a game can become integrated in life. Gamification proposes to embellish the real world with a layer of game-like things to do and earn, and in so doing enhance lives. So in a sense, gamification’s big idea is to regard life as some sort of infinite game.

The problem? Games are no fun unless they are finite.

Video games, we have been led to believe, are about wasting time. It is a misunderstanding that players and game makers have railed against for 40 years. While movies and television are endlessly analysed and debated in the mainstream media, games are characterised as troubling, irresponsible or banal, the fatuous byproducts of the digital revolution.

But a growing number of theorists and designers disagree. This is, after all, an entertainment medium that worldwide makes $50bn a year, a medium in which an estimated one third of UK adults indulge. An emerging school of thought, drawing on cognitive science, psychology and sociology, suggests that our growing love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations.

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.

In western Europe, "eat me" monsters dominated, and the vast majority of both monsters and monster tales involved being killed and eaten. Vampires do not spread their state by a bite, they simply squat on your chest, eating your breath, until you die. Werewolves, similarly, just kill and eat you. Only later were new attributes introduced that made these monsters into their now-familiar forms.

At the recent LOGIN conference, I was on a panel entitled "Wannabe Farmers replacing Pretend Mass-Murderers: Are Social Games a Fad?" To make the panel more interesting the panelists took extreme positions, and I was the solid "social (network) games are a fad" guy. Not that I believe that entirely, but it made for an entertaining panel discussion. (I'll post a link when the talk is posted online.)

But, I mentioned something that I think is very true: business works in cycles. And, by looking at previous cycles we can use them to divine the future of the current cycle. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

This is the world of Bioshock Infinite, a game that was demoed for the press at a pre-E3 event in Los Angeles by Ken Levine, the game's creative director and cofounder of Irrational Games. It's not just that the game looked good—it looked amazing—it's the subtext and commentary the game provides under its exterior that drive the game just as much as the weapons and setting.

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.

I’m starting to realize that most of my blog posts begin with me making excuses about something as well as linking to somebody else’s post or article. Spoiler alert, today will be no different. The excuse is that this post is not my follow-up to my last one about my initial adventures with off-screen particles, due to a lack of time to work on it while moving into a new place and also some disappointing results with mixed resolution rendering. So what I’m talking about instead is my experiences with interviewing for programming intern positions throughout this past Spring. A while back, Jaymin did a great post about programming tests and demos, but I feel like I might have some insights for aspiring entry-level game developers.

The following is a more concise version of a three part series – Designing Enemies: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the MvC

Why are players playing your game?  What motivations did you inspire in them?  Are they the motivations you wanted?

In just a few short years we’ve seen reward systems in games evolve beyond measure — from what was once a simple quest for points to a whirlpool of reward systems…what’s a designer to do?  Take a deeper look at your game, and look at what rewards you’re giving the player — and more importantly, why you’re giving them.  Adding a reward system to your game can often feel like a wild stab in the dark, which is why so many games have turned to the shotgun approach — throw everything in and hope that one catches the players.  Even worse, you could throw a reward system into your game without even understanding what motivations it gives your players.  We can do better than this.  Let’s take a look the reward systems, reasons behind the rewards then talk about how to use them effectively.

Yes, we turned Office into a game! If you're going to spend time immersed in the inner workings of Office, by golly it should be fun. In Ribbon Hero 2, the player will hop on board Clippy's stolen time machine and explore different time periods. With each time period, they get to explore a new game board with challenges they must complete to get to the next level. Each challenge takes the player into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote to complete a task. Discover new Office features by actually using them, with a hint button to fall back on in case you get stuck. Race for a high score with colleagues, classmates and friends, or even put your score on your resume to show off your Office skills!

Since it’s quite a long time after GDC 2011 and I never found the time to do a proper conference report, I thought I’d at least do a link roundup.

"Gamification efforts have come under criticism from many in the games industry for being shallow..."
Yes, you got that part right.
"-- that is, lacking the narrative quality of games made with a pure entertainment motive."
I don't think you understand the criticism, then, if you think "shallow" simply refers to "less narrative quality".

There's a moment in Crysis 2 when a massive explosion separates you from the Marine unit you've been assisting. The fight continues, but, unusually for a video game, it continues without you. From the the distance you hear gunshots echoing off the skyscrapers, the thumping artillery occluded by steel and concrete. The smoke has drifted into the air above you, and the reflection of the streetlights casts an orange veil over the street. If not for the barely perceptible sounds of battle, you might think you were the last person in New York left alive.

If you still practice or encourage the outdated practice of writing long design documents, you are doing your team and your business a grave disfavor. Long design docs embody and promote an insidious world view: They make the false claim that the most effective way to make a game is to create a fixed engineering specification and then hand that off to developers to implement feature by bullet-pointed feature.

My gamified syllabi in classes, for exampled, have bombed. Students *really* don't want their grades determined by MMORPG mechanicsms. That's because one of the essential conditions of XP acquisition - that you can try and try again indefinitely - are missing in a classroom. In teaching, time is limited. So are mob pulls; you can't have as many shots at challenges as you want. In a classroom, you have a few challenges, time runs out, and somebody - me - has to judge how you did. Also, there are not enough opportunities for loose, flowing grouping; every teamwork exercise in a class is forced-grouping which, we've learned, people hate. Add to that the fact that ultimately the class is serious and not play. This means no one can say "settle down, it's just a game." And therefore, they DON'T settle down. They get almost homicidal when another team-mate screws up their grade.

Sony’s huge PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down for a week now following the theft of ID and credit card data on some or all of the gaming and video entertainment network’s 77 million customer accounts. Readers have been asking for comment but I stay out of these things unless I have something new to contribute. That something finally comes a week into the crisis as gamers begin to wonder why the network is still not back in operation and speculate on what this all means to Sony? It’s a huge loss of face, if course, but beyond that the damage to Sony is minimal. And the upside for PSN members, including those involved in the many emerging class action lawsuits, is likely to be bupkes. Nothing.

Pretty much ever since we finished Kivi's Underworld I have had two very different and opposing viewpoints of the game. On one hand I think Kivi is a really cool game and I'm glad that someone made the game. On the other hand I think that Soldak developing Kivi was a mistake. I'm going to talk about both viewpoints a little.

If this (i)Pawn app from Volumique turns out to be real, it could really change the way some games are played on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. The game, which is supposed to be available sometime in November, uses a set of physical playing pieces, or tokens, that actually interact with the touchscreen. Now we’ve already seen iPhone-friendly styluses, so that’s nothing new, but what’s really intriguing here is how the app is able to recognize the individual playing pieces.

Eve Online's players are a notoriously dedicated, and vociferous, bunch. Self-governing, focused and regularly taking part in huge interstellar fleet battles, meeting their expectations presents a daunting challenge to any AI programmer. We sat down with CCP Games senior programmer, Joel McGinnis, to discuss the difference between real and observed artificial intelligence, why MMOG developer's tend to push AI to the bottom of the to-do list and what we can expect from game AI in the future.

There used to be nothing better than going to the store, buying a brand new game, and putting it in your system of choice to sit down for a nice day of gaming. This should be a grand moment: you just bought a game you're excited about playing, and the publisher has your money. These days, however, it has become a wonderful opportunity to punish you instead.

Here's how that goes down, and what I don't want to do when I buy a new game.

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to start designing a game. The first is to start with visuals. You create a world, a series of possible dynamics that might come out of that world, and you have a sense of back story. You tend to describe the world in terms of place, character or storysense, and paint a picture of an experience to inspire your team.

The second is to start with actions. You start with what the player will do, how he will do it, how the game will control and what the camera will do. You tend to think in terms of rules, efficiency and flow and treat the aesthetic components as something that will come along later.

The games industry often uses visually oriented design to sell its ideas, but action oriented design is usually superior for making great games. So why does the visual persist?

Probably the single biggest thing that stands between the idea of making a great game and the reality of actually doing it is the cost.

Even with agile practices in place, games need a certain level of development before they start to show their potential. The game actions need to extend, the loops need to be in place, the dynamic needs to be coming together and the wins need to build toward something. It needs to develop an aesthetic voice and style, work on the user experience and finally have some level of testing. These things take time and money.

How much? It varies massively depending on what it is, but the bare minimum is $100,000. If you find yourself pitching well below that, it usually portends trouble

In her new book, Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that the rules, rewards and feedback offered by modern videogames can be used to make the world a happier and more productive place. We sit down with her to learn more.

So how is the view from way up here? It’s great actually -- we’re really happy with how Cataclysm is going so far, and we have big surprises on the horizon. On the other hand, there are details you can see at ground level that you can’t make out from 10,000 feet.

When we started these blogs, the idea was to foster developer communication to the players without some of the inherent problems of posting in forums. Some players have pointed out recently, and we totally agree, that the blogs up until now have been from a very high vantage point. We looked for topics with universal interest that would feel important and newsworthy. That has worked overall, but we also feel like we’ve lost something from when I used to be down in the metaphorical trenches talking to players in the forums.

MUD: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw's Astonishing Contrivance by Bartle, Richard (GDC Online 2010)

Despite a huge backlog of games trying to get my attention, I found myself playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately. This is in part because of the loot system, which drops random items –mainly hats or weapons– for you to use in customizing your avatar.1 This system has been in TF2 for a while, and it used to be that the only way of getting the gear you wanted was by getting it from a drop or by crafting it from raw materials (which also essentially came from drops). Many players rejoiced and were very proud of their silly hats and weapons.

I've been playing Minecraft a lot lately (when I'm not porting our newest game to Windows and iPad), and I will have several things to write about this truly fascinating game. For example, my nine year old daughter is addicted to it, and I thought her first experience with it was telling.

Mike Dailly, one of the key men behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, has just posted the design documents for the original GTA on his Flickr pages. Race’n'Chase, as it was originally intended to be called, began life on the 25th January 1995 in a design doc authored by K. R. Hamilton. The version posted is 1.05, from 22nd March, explaining how the multiplayer racing game would perhaps also feature a cops and robbers mode. And it makes for excellent reading.

I spent a good portion of my first day at SXSW Interactive sitting in on panels and sessions focusing on the ever-evolving issue of community management. I had the chance to hear many different perspectives on what it means for brands to effectively foster and manage the consumers who care to interact with them via social networks. I heard best practice examples from companies like Pepsi, Starbucks, Zappos, Dell, Ford and many more uberbrands that are pushing the boundaries of social media as a business tool.

With exclusive access to Minecraft creators Mojang, I spent a day with Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and his team in their Stockholm offices, from the first meeting of the morning to the Friday afternoon’s booze and gaming relaxation. With kebab in between. Notch talks to us about how he came to be in the position he’s now in, his intentions for Minecraft and Scrolls, and the philosophy behind his game development. I also speak to his colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh, find out how the team deals with player feedback, their passion for transparency, and Notch’s plans for games after he’s completed Minecraft.

These forums have always been about players talking to players. We don't want to foster the expectation that it's going to get a blue response if someone tries hard enough (lol I'm replying to a thread calling for a blue). While GC added a lot to these forums (and I say 'these forums' because he only posted in the North America forums) we think we can reach more players, particularly those in other regions, more directly through the blogs, or concerted Q&A's. Blogs also tend to be a better medium for getting the message out there loud and clear, but does have downsides that it removes the conversation that we know is appreciated quite a bit.

This is a free, community driven Q&A for professional and independent game developers. It is a part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A websites, and it was created through the open democratic process defined at Stack Exchange Area 51.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

Do you have dusty games in the closet that you grew bored with years ago?

Do your kids beg you to play with them, but you can't stand another round of roll-the-die/pick-a-card, move-your-piece, do-what-the-space-tells-you-to-do, and somebody wins a few hours later?

Do you want to add fun and excitement to your life without spending a dime?

In the last fifteen years, board game designers and dedicated board gamers around the world have learned a thing of two about what really makes board games fun for adults. The principles used in modern board game designs can be used to help you rejuvenate your old board games. You, too, can learn to love board games again.

OK. It’s Friday night and I admit I’ve had a drink or possibly two already, which means that I’m in a mood for talking and sharing, possibly more than I normally would. But sharing is a bit of the point of blogging, isn't it?

There won't be any pretence or cover-up. This is the truth, the reality the way it is, including cracks and less-than-perfect. But even if this post starts in misery, I assure you it will get much better towards the end. Don’t worry. Just have a seat and a pint and relax while I'm sharing my story, OK? And don't forget I love my guild.

Now let's get started, shall we? (Larísa fills a pint to the brim and heads for her favorite armchair, takes a sip and clears her throat before speaking up.)

Laralyn McWilliams and I gave a talk today at GDC. These are the slides for those who are interested: Intuition vs. Metrics: How Social Game Design Has Evolved.

For Zynga, the success of FarmVille was exciting for sure. But it was also a ticking time-bomb. Suddenly, FarmVille had amassed millions of players who were farming their crops, building their buildings, and slowly leveling up through the game very quickly.

But for how long?

Many of these were players who had never been so involved in a game before. What were they going to be doing a few months from now? A year from now?

Both of these options would mean a disastrous and mighty fall for Zynga, which at the time was still a young company. But it was easy to imagine — growing from 0 to 80 million users in a little over six months, a reversal in the next six months could happen just as fast.

But Zynga wasn’t going to let this happen, and through quick thinking and brilliant execution, it was able to defuse their 80 million strong time-bomb and keep their flagship franchise going.

Sometimes all a design needs is a little pick me up.

There are many times in life when it seems like there’s no hope, when you’ve tried all the options, when you’re just spent, and you just give up. Your project that you’ve been working on has sold a few copies and has received mediocre reviews, and you think that you would have a better chance with another idea.

But sometimes it’s not the design or the idea of the original game that counts, it’s the execution. Sometimes the design is a potential blockbuster, all that’s needed is strong perseverance to keep working on it, promoting it, and making it better until it fires off like a rocket ship. Sometimes failure isn’t have a design that isn’t successful; failure is just quitting before an unsuccessful design is turned into a winner.

I’ve never been fully satisfied with the definitions of ‘play’ and ‘game’ that have currency in Game Studies. Where I really have trouble is when I try to apply them to the fields of ethics and the philosophy of law in which I now tend to write.

In my recent analysis of sports law and the historical relationships between violence, criminal law and governance (focusing on duelling, boxing, rugby etc) I’ve been searching for an explanation of what is going on when sport is left to get on with it - free from ‘magisterial interference’, as the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 put it.

I’ve touched on some of this in a recent post (People play online http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2011/02/people-play-online-.html) – but what I did not focus on there was a more formal characterisation of the thing at the centre of sport and games i.e. play.

As promised in the talk itself, here are the slides for the talk I just gave on “Social Mechanics for Social Games” — an updated version of the talk I gave back at GDC Austin.

Brace yourselves, readers, this week's column is going to be another adventure in pitching hypothetical new game concepts that I have no time to make myself and don't expect anyone else to attempt either. This is one I've been thinking about for a while and for which the aftermath of my DC Universe Online review will serve decently enough as a vehicle, because it concerns RPGs, or at least, RPG elements.

Eyewitness Accounts of MMO Hacks, Griefs, and Cheats on a Grand Scale
Put enough people in one place and sooner or later someone will test the boundaries. MMORPGs are no exception. Ranging from the hilariously frivolous to the monetarily disastrous, here are five stories of player-fueled negativity that have made an indelible mark on massively multiplayer gaming, plus a bonus interview of gamers taking extraordary steps to restore one MMORPG to its former glory.

The Assassination of Lord British

At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers. Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words "Get out of bed. Do not touch the keyboard" were ringing in his ears.

Gembe knew why they were there. But, bleary-eyed, he asked anyway.

"You are being charged with hacking into Valve Corporation's network, stealing the videogame Half-Life 2, leaking it onto the internet and causing damages in excess of $250 million," came the reply. "Get dressed."

Gamification is a new vocabulary word lately, and there’s even a summit about it. What is the definition of gamification? The word gamification is used to describe companies integrating game mechanics into their non-gaming product or service to drive user engagement. These companies are “gamifying” their products and services by adding light game mechanics on top of them.

What does that actually look like? While the term is relatively new, the tactics aren’t and have already been in play for quite some time. Here are some examples of gamification in action.

I’ve been quite surprised by how well-received my previous post on gamification has been. As a long-time geek who played role-playing games in her youth, I’m all about a good game, and love that companies are taking hold of these theories and putting them to use in attracting and retaining customers.

I’ve seen a number of great posts recently about gamification and wanted to highlight a few of them here.

The Game Prodigy strives to provide game design articles and discussion that are immediately practical to readers. We believe that a game design resource should be as useful to game designers as a programming how-to is to an engineer, or a style guide is to an artist. Game design discussion should be useful, concrete, and understandable.

Game Design in itself, not game programming, not project management, but just deciding what to build, is a difficult problem in itself. There are common problems in game design that have been solved, and designers should have access to those solutions from other games and developers instead of having to retrace the same steps.

For this reason, at The Game Prodigy we focus less on theory and more on results. We look at case studies of successful designs and see how we can use them in our own games. We discuss the merits of different designs and what platforms they are appropriate for. We avoid talking about designs in a vacuum, instead saying, “This design was used in this context and produced this result.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Bayonetta. I gave up on it about a month ago, mostly because I found it tedious, incoherent, and punishing (purely from a receptive standpoint), but also because I felt embarrassed playing it. I found myself having to explain the indulgence to my partner, who, while sitting next to me on the couch or passing by the TV, would reel in horror as Bayonetta’s porn star Barbie body fought doll faced angels with stripper like finesse. From an outsider’s perspective, Bayonetta is an encapsulation of all that is wrong with videogames. But I don’t think that is entirely the case, and the shame I felt had more to do with the reception of my partner than what I was actually feeling while playing the game. In fact, quite unexpectedly, Bayonetta exhibits feminist resistances lacking from most other games; however, it is ultimately a failed project because these resistances are not adequately engaged with patriarchal hegemony. Or to put it another way, Bayonetta needs to learn from Lady Gaga.

​It's hard to keep track of every event in gaming's past. The industry has grown, fallen, and expanded for over forty years, and it shows no signs of stopping.

The are many wonderful books that follow extensive history of video games, but we'd like to talk about five films that should be watched for a holistic view of the medium. Some of these films may be hard to track down, but check them out if you can because they will make you understand the way other people play games.

When you are a game designer, you become more attuend to this phenomena, but it is all around us. In games, we really notice it. In fact, a talented journalist once reviewed kudos by saying “it’s just watching numbers go up, but sometimes, that’s all you need”. (or words to that effect.)

Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. “The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug,” Srivastava says. “I thought, ‘This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.’”

Bruce Rogers and I graduated from Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp in January and began researching how HTML5 could apply to games across the Web. We found HTML5 poised to become a potent platform for game development but still hampered by significant performance variance among browsers and drawing techniques. We're hosting a tech talk this evening on what's becoming possible with HTML5 this evening along with speakers from Zynga and SproutCore which will be streamed live.

The exercise was to take typical calendar events (a day of four events was provided as an example) and turn them into a game. The notion that this is possible comes from Danc’s post about Ribbon Hero on Lost Garden, where he writes:
If an activity can be learned…
If the player’s performance can be measured…
If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.
Each pair of designers was to apply the following game mechanics to their calendar schedule: points, levels, quests, feedback and inventory. As no concern was to be given for the interface itself, wireflows were used to illustrate the mechanics in use.

1999, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: we meet in person for the first time. We had found each other via our medium, the networked computer and had a brief but passionate virtual love affair. We got to know each other doing what we loved doing most, making websites and interactive artworks online. We begin living and working together soon after. 2003: Leaving behind careers of net.art and web design, the two of us radically redirect all our creative attention towards the medium of videogames. February 2005: After 2 years of designing and prototyping, our first project 8 is rejected by games publishers, then the only source of funding. We are devastated but determined to continue and to keep our independence. Reboot. September 2005: Launch of The Endless Forest. October 2006: presentation of the Realtime Art Manifesto at the Mediaterra festival in Athens. January 2007: Drama Princess engine complete. March 2008: Launch of The Graveyard. March 2009, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: launch of The Path.

Christmas is usually pretty fun in our family, and I do my best to add to the flavor of the season. I still make weird faces for the group picture (my hope is that my family will not have any “normal” photos for my funeral collage and instead will have to put pictures of me with my finger up my nose while they weep and say, “We will miss him!”), and I still come up with bizarre wish lists.

When I buy a AAA game from the store, I have a vested interest in liking the game. I’ve plonked $60 down for it, so there’s less of a chance I’ll abandon it just because the installer is annoying, or the tutorial is a bit dull, or because I have to create an account first. I’ll give the game a chance… at least a half hour.

But if it’s a web game, I’m not going to give it more than a minute of my time. That first minute has to hook me, draw me into the second minute. The second minute has to draw me into the third, and so on, until I’m solidly invested in the game.

Kinect is a new video game system that is fully controlled by bodily movements. It's vaguely similar to the Wii, but doesn't use a controller (and doesn't have the associated risk of banging up your living room if you lose your grip on the Wii wand during an aggressive tennis swing).

Kinect observes users through a video camera and recognizes gestures they make with different body parts, including hands, arms, legs, and general posture. The fitness program, for example, is fond of telling me to "do deeper squats," which it can do because it knows how my entire body is moving. Analyzing body movements in such detail far exceeds the Wii's capabilities, though it's still not going to put my trainer down at the gym out of work.

I was trying to communicate to management that server developers have different priorities than game developers. As a means to show the importance of laying in administrative infrastructure, and other software engineering "overhead", I put this list together. Hope it helps you to think about making the right investment in making the system sustainable, and make those points to the powers that be.

I'm primarily a server programmer, but I still end up doing UI work every once in a while, and that's been true for the majority of the last three weeks. Not being an experienced old hand at UI design, I find myself falling back on first principles and decade-old books. I'm mostly happy with the results, but the code that results in implementing the interface... well, it's not the kind of code that I like to write.

Ga*mi*fi*ca*tion = integrating game dynamics into a digital platform, service, community, content or campaign, in order to engage individuals while simultaneously driving meaningful value for doing business (read: monetization).

Every individual is hungry for reward, status, achievement, competition and self-expression. Gamification uses proven techniques to satisfy each individual's needs & desires and to engage each individual with personal relevant transmedia experiences (content, communities, brands, services or other valued solutions).