Game Design Advance

One of the hardest things to do as a game designer is the balancing act between being clever and being obtuse. Sitting with our own ideas for too long we often start to subconsciously justify our decisions, thinking that they’re more obvious than they are. We’re then flabbergasted when other people don’t immediately grasp the things we thought were simple.

Brenda Brathwaite considers the same question on her blog, Applied Game Design, and comes to the conclusion: “change your design, not the player.”

While I think that a large part of games actually is about changing the player’s natural instincts and inclinations, or at least tweaking them a little, she is right when she maintains that the solution is not trying to press your point. It’s better to simply give in and try something different. There’s a good chance that in the end it’ll make for a better game. Failing that, it’s always good to work with tangible design challenges.

Michael Abbott, who writes a blog called The Brainy Gamer, has a new post that strikes the same chord that our own Charles Berkeley Miller often does, musing on the design and culture of sports and intimating how it might overlap with digital game design. Abbott’s post is about the joys of keeping score in Baseball, and he wonders aloud if maybe some video games, specifically RPGs, wouldn’t benefit from more openly embracing their numerical side.

Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) author who has started writing some interesting things about games from a narrative perspective. IF grew out of and away from text adventures, which means that they’ve been grappling interactivity and narrative while everyone else has just been talking about it.

Over on GameSetWatch she has an article about the storytelling potential of games like Diner Dash and Miss Management. The article itself seems to meander a bit, but basically she seems to be saying that the intimate, moment-to-moment interaction with characters in these games can create a strong bond with the player, and that this bond is not being fully exploited in the narrative structure.

There’s an interesting article by Kieron Gillen up on The Escapist about the aesthetics of Gears of War and the game’s maturity level in general. His basic argument is that most of the people who criticize GoW for it’s ridiculous storyline and over-the-top machismo don’t rest the same harsh gaze on titles like Devil May Cry, which celebrate heroes and stories that are just as insipid. His point ends up being that there’s an important place for juvenalia in culture, but it also served to make me wonder just how low my standards are when it come to games. Personally I don’t think that Gears had the level of self-awareness that excuses something like Bad Boys II, but that’s just me. Either way, Gillen is always a good read.

Article here.