Exactly how much fun is it possible for someone have playing a game? My game design philosophy has always been that games create an Experience. For the vast majority of games that are made, I would say around 99%, the core experience that companies, student developers, and indie developers are shooting for is for the game to be fun.

Humans are naturally competitive. (We do call it the ‘human race’, after all!) We like validation of our place in the world. When society provides independent measures of our success, we can contextualize our personal achievements.

I make fun of systems designers a lot because I am one. I wear a lot of hats, and I actually love to code, but deep down, it’s all about the game systems.

People who think like me are really useful to have on your MMO team. They won’t just dig into the guts of your game, they will revel in the guts of your game, sorting them this way and that, modeling them in myriad ways. This will, generally, result in a better product.

But they won’t ever come to the producer and say, “Okay! The balancing is all finished!” Trust me: that will never happen.

The only strange thing about this talking wolf is the high quality of its conversation. “I could shoot you, you know,” I threaten the wolf, having already established that my daughter might still be alive inside its belly. That wasn’t picked from a dialogue menu; I typed it in. Without missing a beat, the wolf responds, “I’m afraid you’ll have to.” Sentient characters and interactive dialogue have been common this entire play session. Impressed? The game’s responses are driven by game designer Jason Rohrer.

I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference entitled Achievements Considered Harmful?, with a strong emphasis on the "?". Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be "fair and balanced", I delved into what the data show and what they don't show.

Lee Sheldon is an accomplished screenwriter and game writer, having worked on TV shows like ST:TNG and Charlie's Angels as well as the Agatha Christie series of games from The Adventure Company. He now teaches game design courses for Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications. Instead of assigning his students a grade at the end of the course, he instead starts every student at 0 xp and they earn points through completing quests like solo projects and quizzes in addition to grouping up for guild projects and pick up groups. How many points they have at the end of the course determines their actual "grade."

- I’ve always said employees should be using their real names to provide transparency and accountability. If you can’t handle being the public face of a company and all that implies, get another job. It’s that easy. It is not always that FUN, mind you. - My customers are not public citizens. Making them public citizens against their will is crappy. I can think of half a dozen reasons why someone should be allowed to be anonymous, and I’m not going to list them because any one of them is good enough. Want people to stop acting like asshats on the boards? Suspend in game accounts for out of game behavior. Hire more mods. Close the board. Whatever. This is just chickenshit.

Cactus may get away with abusing his players just for fun, but he's well recognised enough to be invited to talk at the GDC. I for one can't afford even to momentarily bore or annoy my audience, because they'll drop me like a hot coal and move on to something else. It's not like there's any shortage of free alternatives for them to try (none of my games are on that list - ledsen). You don't get any favours when nobody's heard of you (not that any of my games actually are any good).

I don't want to be all negative though, so how about something constructive? Let's have a look at "how not to make your game abusive", so as to preserve the universal balance of... the universe? To do so we'll be exploring three problems which can contribute to making your game particularly annoying: repetition, randomness and incoherence.

The Boardgamers of Greater Akron Design and Prototype (BoGA DaP) Committee helps non-digital game designer’s develop quality prototype board games by the sharing of design information and providing playtest opportunities. BoGA is a flexible, open and largely self-organizing group committed to high quality games.

As long as there have been video games, there have been ways to cheat in them. They range from harmless codes that change the weather in Red Dead Redemption to serious hacks that make your aim perfect in Counter-strike. There are different layers of the severity as well; while wallhacking will get you a VAC ban on Steam, it’s likely that no one is going to care if you turn on The Sims 3 and give everyone in your town some free Simoleons.

As examined in Part I, a game’s meaning springs from its mechanics and not necessarily from its theme, especially if the two are in conflict. Such a dissonance can leave players feeling lost, perhaps even cheated. Thus, designers should strive to keep the two in harmony. At the very least, they should not be fighting each other.