101–110 of 186 posts
For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
Someone should convince Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to write too.
This reads like the handbook for people making grind-based games. Sure enough, the author exclusively works in the mmorpg space. If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt. Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun. Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well. Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a comp…
Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.
> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices
I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.
Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.
I watched a lot of Sakurai's (Smash Bro's director and creator of Kirby) videos on game design and development and not once did he bring up "dopamine" or any other neurochemical. I think once you start thinking about game design from this perspective you are essentially looking for ways to exploit human psychology which explains how a lot of games have now turned into casinos. Some of the best games out there defy a…
Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. It's about making people have fun, fun is a psychological state and dopamine release is intrinsicly linked to that. That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun. Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You…
If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hints. What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?
Or even look at Shenmue. While every game at the time was a platformer where you collected things, Shenmue made you take on a partime job doing fork lifting, yet it is a cult classic. Did they use a framework to make that decision? Doesn't seem like it when it defied all game design at the time.
Tell me why all MMOs are crap or just fail and as a result turned into a gambling institution.
And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.
In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.
For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
I hadn't heard of the author before this. I'll definitely read more of their stuff, but I thought the bottom line for part three was a little incomplete. > Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have. Sure, starting from 0%, adding uncertainty adds depth. But the player needs to maintain some influence over that uncertainty. If you crank the uncertainty up too…
In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.
And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.
For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
I wouldn’t say A Theory of Fun is “the book.” It’s more a coffee table read. “The book” is Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design
https://tynansylvester.com/book/
Haven't read it yet myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. It's about making people have fun, fun is a psychological state and dopamine release is intrinsicly linked to that. That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun. Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You…
>Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hi…
This and the other scenarios you mention are deliberately created to make the player have fun. They are all engineered to manipulate the player’s emotions, the intention is to trigger dopamine and other neurological reactions. As I said, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing!
You don’t have to think about it in terms of chemical reactions, but artificially creating fun is the goal, if you boil it down.
You do get that dopamine hit when you achieve a goal in Shenzen.io, or even a self-directed goal in Shenmue, whether the designers thought that way or not.
As Raph Koster says, fun is linked to progression and learning.
Progression applies to self directed goals too (you’re setting yourself a series of minor goals when driving the forklift in Shenmue).
Ironically, motivation theory tells us that the intrinsic fun of doing undirected chores in Shenmue or mastering facts about the systems in Shenzen.io is stronger than the onslaught of mostly extrinsic rewards generated by Cookie Clicker. You had less fun playing that game, that’s one of many reasons why.
> Bottom line: fun is basically about making progress on prediction. I'm having some trouble parsing this sentence. Does he mean that "player has fun if their predictions lead to progress"?
Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.
Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.
So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.