Global Game Jam

In January next year we will be running a Sydney meet of the Global Game Jam at the Powerhouse Museum. Forty developers, designers and artists will be spending a weekend at the PHM working round the clock to create exciting new game ideas. There will also be speakers from the local and international games industry. It will be a very exciting event.

Details are still being arranged, but if you want to know more, watch the IGDA Sydney Facebook group or follow @GameJamSydney on Twitter. And tell your friends! This is going to be big!

Books: Playing For Real

Playing for Real: A Text on Game Theory, by Ken Binmore.

In a text on game design you’ll often find a short advisory note somewhere in the introduction that distinguishes game design from game theory. Game theory has nothing to do with the entertainment industry and is best summarised as the mathematical foundation of economics. It attempts to provide a model of rational decision making in which players strive find strategies to optimise their payoffs. The ‘games’ analysed are usually very simple bargaining problems and are not exactly what we’d consider “fun”. Why then would I be recommending a game theory text on a blog about game design?

Books: Emergence

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson.

Emergence is one of those slippery ideas that is hard to define, other than to say “I know it when I see it”. Loosely it occurs when a system containing many interacting “atomic” components exhibits patterns at a higher level of abstraction, especially when these patterns are hard to explain in terms of atomic interactions. So the behaviour of the air in a balloon is fairly easy to describe as the average of the movement of all its individual molecules, but the behaviour of an ant colony is more than just the sum of the behaviours of the individual ants. We say the latter is “emergent” while the former is not.

The Big Triangle

I’m currently preparating a lecture for a class on “Sensation” aesthetics for game design (i.e. the ways in which games evoke sense-pleasure through images, music and movement). In doing so I’ve been thinking about Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle. For those unfamiliar with it (and if this is you, you should go read Understanding Comics right now), it is a depiction of the continuum of artistic styles between realistic, iconic and abstract art.

Most game designers are familiar with McCloud’s work so I won’t go over the details here. Other’s have already dealt with the implications for game art, but it occurs to me the the same triangle could be drawn for game mechanics.

Can’t blog. Teaching.

Things are going to be quieter for a while as I am busy teaching my game design class, running the UNSW Game Deconstruction Group and trying to do some non-game research on the side.

Books: What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee

While this is indisputably a book about game design, it is not a book for game designers or even for gamers. At least not expressly so. Gee, a professor of linguistics, psychology and education, is writing for teachers and education theorists, describing the many learning principles (36 in all) that can be found in modern video games — and are often lacking, he claims, in our schools. So while in a sense the book is telling designers what they are already doing well, it is valuable to have this implicit wisdom analysed and set out as a set of explicit principles.

Books: Exercises in Style

Exercises in Style,
by Raymond Queneau

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style,
by Matt Madden

These two books both belong firmly in the “Secret Books” category. Neither book has anything explicit to say about games and you’d probably be hard pressed to find anything immediately useful in either one, but they tend to appear on the bookshelves of game designers with surprising frequency.

Books: Third Person

Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardruip-Fruin (Eds).

When we come to discuss writing fiction for games it is common to focus on ’story’ or ‘plot’, which leads to the inevitable debate about whether an interactive game can tell an authored story, or whether the two are wholly inimicable. While this may be an interesting debate, it overlooks much of the craft of writing fiction. The plot is only part of what makes a good story; characterisation plays an equal role, as does the construction of a believable setting.

Books: Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods,
by Umberto Eco.

In my recent review of Peter Rabbit I spoke about the dangers of “AI Arrogance” and the embarrassment of Narrative AI research that is done without an up-to-date understanding of narrative theory. Now I must confess that I am not as well informed in this area as I might be. I have attempted on several occasions to read some of the canonical books in this area (Booth, Genette, Brooks) and found them rather dry and hard going. Perhaps it is true of any creative discipline: there are those who are engaging authors and those who are skilled theoreticians.

Umberto Eco is the rare exception,

The gameplay/interface divide

Jespel Juul and Marleigh Norton presented a paper at the recent Foundations of Digital Games conference in which they questioned the popular wisdom that games should have “easy to use interfaces, but … provide difficult gameplay challenges”. To quote from the abstract:

this paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.

I argue that they are wrong and the reason for their error is that they are regarding games from the point of view of the player, not of the designer. I will be so bold as to claim that it is of critical importance that the designer makes a very clear distinction between the gameplay and the interface and tries to always abide be the “easy to use, challenging to play” maxim.