The Ludologist

Another year, another Nobel Prize in economics that sounds immediately relevant to multiplayer game design.

Quoting Steven Levitt’s description of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson’s work awarded:

The prize was “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” Mechanism design formalizes ways of thinking about how a social planner, manager, or parent can set up rules so that all parties involved have the incentives to act in the way that the planner/manager/parent prefers. This Nobel is not for the idea that you can design incentives this way, but rather for coming up with ingenious proofs that simplify the task of proving that, indeed, all parties have the right incentives — a task that can turn out to be awfully difficult.

That is, I am sure it is relevant, but my personal experience with game theory is that anything more complicated than the prisoner’s dilemma tends to become so fantastically complicated that designers just design from their own intuitions anyway.

Is anybody actually using game theory for designing video games?

The Independent Games Festival has published their list of entrants for the 2008 competition. This is the 10th IGF.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that indie and experimental games have gained a lot of popular attention during the last 2-3 years.

Just 2 years ago I felt that indie games were perceived as “games with low production values”, but now it seems to be more accepted that they can provide something unique, a special sensibility.

Perhaps it relates to new distribution methods. Student project gets massive publicity, becomes PS3 downloadable (flow). Quirky indie game is sold on XBLA (Eets, Space Giraffe).

With casual games and downloadable console games, we have a distribution method and economical model for smaller games.

Echochrome was probably the game of Tokyo Game Show that I found the most compelling. If you haven’t read about it, it’s all about rotating the world in order to create Escher-like optical illusions which then actually work.

Hard to say why, but the 2d games of the show looked great on high-definition screens. Seriously. Echochrome and LocoRoco – not sure if they justify a PS3 and a 40 inch TV, but we are getting there.

Here’s William Huber playing Halo 3 at TGS:

And here’s the game up close:

I am not entirely convinced here – I feel fighting games and multiplayer shooters are the games that benefit the least from next-gen graphics. There’s a brief “wow” minute, and then everything feels like it always did. But there you are.

So here’s a brief report from the floor at the Tokyo Game Show 2007:

I met Bomberman.