March 2010
8 posts
7 tags
Cognition, randomness, and deception
Frank Lantz, responding in the comment thread of a blog post he made today:
I would like to encourage game designers to stop thinking of players as subjects of psychological experiments and think of them as collaborators, fellow researchers in the experiments games allow us to do on ourselves.
The original post concerns talks by Sid Meier and Rob Pardo at the most recent GDC concerning randomness...
Press The Buttons: Exploring The Capcom Turnaround →
Matthew Green:
If you pay close enough attention while playing Capcom’s 2D action platformer sidescrollers, eventually you’ll begin to notice a pattern emerge when it comes to level design. Eventually the protagonist will come to a point on his journey where the path will force him to drop into a room from above, make a quick jog to the right, drop down to the ground, and continue...
4 tags
Everyone Loves a Period Piece 2
Stealth games are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and with good reason: they can inject buckets of tension into their gameplay. Part of the tension is intended, but unfortunately a lot of the times part of it comes from the fact that, perhaps unintentionally, getting caught can just be no fun at all. I finished Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) the other day, and came away...
2 tags
Another Castle podcast
Hear me talk about Mass Effect, Animal Crossing, interactive fiction and Wittgenstein in the latest episode of Another Castle. It’s always a blast to sit down and have a conversation about games with Charles J. Pratt (illustrious game designer and host of Another Castle), and I hope it’s fun to listen to as well.
I have an unshakably high opinion of myself, so it’s a big deal...
4 tags
Of secret sauces
Dennis Crowley, Foursquare founder, in a recent interview with O’Reilly Radar:
The game mechanics [in Foursquare] are the secret sauce. They keep people engaged long enough to see the interesting things that happen when they participate frequently. It’s kind of like with Twitter. If you drop someone in Twitter and don’t give them a reason to participate, they get bored of it...
5 tags
Cry Havok
“Cry Havok” is a fun game you can play if you have friends, roommates, etc. who play video games while you are in the room or who are often around when you are playing games. The only prerequisite is having played enough games to recognize the presence of the Havok Physics Engine, the most frequently licensed physics middleware in modern video gaming.
If you haven’t trained...
6 tags
All Wark AND All Play
I recently finished the main quest of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, coincidentally right around the time that Shiren the Wanderer for Wii was coming out and Jeremy Parish started talking about roguelikes a lot. This got me into sort of a roguelike kick, so you may be seeing a few posts from me on the subject over the next week or so.
First I want to talk about about...
4 tags
Trajectile: Aiming
Trajectile is a new DSiWare game developed by Q-Games and published by Nintendo that every Warp Skip! writer who owns a DSi has been raving over for the past week or two. It presents an interesting puzzle game that reminds me a little of Breakout mixed with Bust-a-Move. Its aiming mechanic requires the use of the stylus to pick an angle at which to aim your shot, which comes from the bottom screen...