The Ludologist

At Businessweek, an interview with Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Smith and Simon Byron on game designs they dislike:

• Peter Molyneux picks cutscenes (that old chestnut).
• Simon Byron says stealth.
• More interesting, Jonathan Smith points to games that are too balanced(!).

Jonathan Smith’s basic argument is that if the game is never too easy or too hard, as a player you feel “you might not be there at all”. This is a bit controversial in relation to current research (such as Robin Hunicke‘s) of auto-adjusting difficulty, where the game is supposed to match itself to the player.
Jonathan Smith’s point ties in with Noah Falstein’s article in Steve Rabin’s Introduction To Game Development, where he describes the ideal game difficulty as one that shifts between being hard and easy. As I recall, the basic argument is that as a player I should first try something very hard, and then a bit later get the experience that a challenge has become easy because of my newly acquired skills:

That sounds like an argument against perfect balance and against automatic difficulty adjustment, doesn’t it? But perhaps the better conclusion is not to avoid balancing and difficulty adjustment, but to balance and diffulty-adjust as to aim for something like the ebb and flow in the model above.

Good balancing is paramount, but balancing should not aim for a straight line.

Via Gonzalo, I must link to this clip of a chimpanzee playing Ms. Pac-Man:

As far as I have read recently, some mammals such as humans, pigs, and chimpanzees will perform mental challenges just for the fun of it, but lemurs will only do it for food.
I think this means that frivolousness is a sure sign of intelligence. Good to know in the summer heat.

IGDA has just released their brand new updated 2006 Casual Games White Paper. The white paper is an absolutely excellent resource for developers and even researchers interested in casual games. Get it. It’s free.

According to a Macrovision report, summarized at Gamasutra, casual gamers are a lot more hardcore than you may think:

37 percent of those who use casual games play nine or more two-hour ‘sessions’ each week.
In addition, the survey, of 789 worldwide participants, found that casual gameplay happens most often at night, as opposed to during commute hours or other ‘quick break’ times during the day, again indicating that the moniker ‘casual’ is a little anachronistic for the gameplay style.

I don’t think this contradicts the conventional wisdom about having a low barrier of entry to a casual game, and making it playable in very small time spans – for the players I think it is all about not having to spend hours getting into a game, and being free to play when and how they want to.

People may still play a puzzle game for hours, but of their own free will …

I am working on an article about the most disrespected and despised game genre there is. That’s right, matching tile games.

For that, I am looking at tracing the innovations and developments of the last 20 or so years. The following tree is an attempt at illustrating the lineages of gameplay innovations from roughly Tetris to Chuzzle. For each game you can see the year of publication plus the innovations of that game listed with a “+” to the side.

Arrows mean “family resemblance and probably inspiration” – I will not attempt to verify that a specific game designer was inspired by a specific other game.

Question: Am I missing a game that contributed to the history of matching tile games? Do you find the connections playsible?

Click here to open a larger version of the diagram.

Interview with Chris Crawford at Gamasutra.

I must admit that I admire the conviction of Chris Crawford’s statements, but there is a worrying edge to them, as in:

GS: How do you feel that the creative spark has gone out of the industry?

CC: Well basically, new ideas don’t go anywhere. So the industry is just rehashing the same stuff over and over. During the 80s there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of new ideas being tried (many of them really bad) but there was at least experimentation. Now we don’t see any experimentation whatsoever.

I would personally say that a lot of new ideas are popping up – in rhythm games, open-ended simulations, MMOs, alternative interfaces, the Icos, etc… So what about the Wii?

GS: Continuing with the Nintendo theme, do you feel that the Wii in is a step in the right direction as far as innovation? Or do you think it’s going to be the same old stuff only with a fancy new controller?

CC: More likely, the latter. I’m not a fortune teller. I don’t know what they’ll do. But I think that it is reasonable to expect that an industry that hasn’t produced any innovation in at least a decade is unlikely to change its spots.

Perhaps being open to new directions and surprises can be a good thing?
So what does Crawford propose with the new StoryTron?

CC: It’s interactive storytelling. [Now that’s new! – JJ.]
GS: And what does that mean to the common person?

CC: It’s a story you get to participate in as the protagonist. You’re the hero…and you let the story go. It’s not at all like a regular story. It’s not as if you’re just following the footsteps of the hero in a standard movie. Interactive storytelling has a more meandering feel to it. You don’t charge down a plot line towards the end, you meander through a social environment. The key thing is that it’s about people, not things. Social interaction, not mechanical interaction. The primary thing you do an interactive storytelling is talk to other people. What a concept! Most gamers react to that concept with some disdain: ?all you do is sit around and talk? That?s no fun,? and it isn?t any fun for many gamers. But that’s the kind of thing that most people spend most of their time doing.

I don’t think I can count the number of times I have heard such a description of a new game or game project. How about Omikron: Nomad Soul?

The game is entirely in 3D real time. Players can visit the immense city of Omikron, with its hundreds of passers-by, air-cushion vehicles, its day/night cycles and its random weather. Behind each door in the city lies a real decor. The player can thus go for a drink in a bar, buy a book in a bookshop, look for medication in a pharmacy or go to watch a strip tease show.
He can also go back to his apartment to watch hologram television.

In Omikron-The Nomad Soul, the player can explore the universe, dialog with the characters, interact with the environment, fight with hands/feet, use weapons, make and cast spells, drive air-cushion vehicles and reincarnate.

To Crawford’s credit, his two main points about verbs and people, not things, really are strong points. Now show me the money!