They're more like spreadsheets than databases.
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Thinking of games as databases
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#22This kind of approach maybe good for very big companies, but it absolutely kills small companies and indie devs.
Indie Devs should be thinking of games as products to complete first and foremost. Don't get bogged down in articles like this, or what's the best tech. Just ship it.
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#23Remember: game devs don’t create intelligent game entities; instead they create the illusion of intelligence. Game dev is a big smoke an mirrors charade. Any system that could be queried needs to be built and maintained. Creating game entities that have models of feeling or have opinions about the groups of people they belong to has to be modeled and built. Unfortunately game dev is very informationally and financial…
There's a solid game design framework underlying that choice, beyond just being smoke and mirrors. Most single player games are not "true games". They are puzzles. This is also how players perceive them. As defined by Chris Crawford a game requires competition. Multiple agents who play, which creates the possibility of win and loss. In most single player games, the game agents are not equal competitors who can win. T…
I don't think "gamers" or the general population agree with your definition on true games.
Nintendo single player games are often considered the gold standard of games in different genres. Mario, Zelda, Pokemon are all household names.
I do think your points were interesting, so thanks for sharing!
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#24This kind of approach maybe good for very big companies, but it absolutely kills small companies and indie devs. Indie Devs should be thinking of games as products to complete first and foremost. Don't get bogged down in articles like this, or what's the best tech. Just ship it.
> Indie Devs should be thinking of games as products to complete first and foremost.
Large studios should keep this in mind as well.
Lately, the trend seems to be: live service is 100% at release, core game play and narrative are wanting.
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, there is no point in the system being "intelligent" and "emergent" for the sake of it, if the gameplay is buggy or boring.
Thinking back to the example in the article, there's no reason why the game designer can't just script in a player ambush, since it's a plausible thing to have happen next. I don't think you need any kind of "game intelligence" to tell a compelling story.
It depends on what kind of game you want. In many games scripted events are fine, but a game like Skyrim would feel much more alive if NPCs could do more than walk back and forth all day. In those cases scripting becomes a lot of work very quickly - the Mass Effect series had a lot of different outcomes based on player choices, in the end the final game was disappointingly linear and predictable and handling thousands of possibilities turned out to be a bit much. Immersive game worlds could use a lot of improvements.
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#26Well, yes. Anything with "stats" or "inventory" looks very much like a database to me. This kind of thinking could also help avoid the risk of object-duplication bugs that occur in games which haven't been entirely rigorous about transactions.
Like the good old Dark Souls glitch that lets players drop a negative amount of items or consume a single item multiple times if triggered from some graphics options menu.
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#27There are serious aesthetic ramifications for running with the idea of games (and especially game rules) as being primarily composed of databases. Specifically, at least in my experience, foregrounding database thinking when making game rules tends to make it easier for designers to add more rules and rule variations, or a lot more "content" generally, that tends to be more shallow and less novel in terms of surprisi…
I suppose the antithesis of this is Nethack, where there is a huge variety of weird and wonderful interactions between items and the player, all of which are special-cased in the (C) source.
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#28The title is misleading. Most large enough games do use databases in some form, just like a lot of software.
If the title was a bit more accurate to its content, it would avoid a lot of disagreements here.
"Building games with AI agents? Use a graph database." -- or something like that.
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#29Of course, a game is a virtual world, and the player's behavior in this virtual world can express his inner thoughts to a certain extent, including good and malice, and some sociologists have conducted sociological research through the player's behavior in games.
What does this have to do with game state being a database?
Re: Thinking of games as databases
#30They're more like spreadsheets than databases.
This brings back the memory of how we used Microsoft Excel to generate the .csv files to drive the game engine in Diablo 2 and stored the .xls files in version control, by the time we started work of production on the expansion we only needed about 3 of the 10 programmers (at our studio) to support the work because most of changes could be done by adding lines to the spreadsheets. This might sound rote today but the original, Diablo 1, had a bunch of hardcoded tables in the source code. I still used the Diablo 1 source code as a starting point for a lot of stuff, though. :)