Once again, Soren Johnson reads my mind and regurgitates it much more eloquently than I could ever wish to.

I can’t even quote it as it is a collection of quotes, but I do have to comment on:

Zynga’s Mark Skaggs, formerly of EA, praised metrics as the answer to most game design problems. Much has been made about their discovery that pink was the best color for advertising Zynga’s other games, but the telling point was when Skaggs said that “if a player repeats something, it’s fun.”

I hadn’t heard that before. It’s so wrong that it is almost obvious. I ride the subway every day. It isn’t fun. I scanned every item in Metroid Prime in fear I’d miss something. It wasn’t fun. I walked A LOT in Grand Theft Auto. I drove aimlessly a lot in Far Cry 2. I scanned every planet in Mass Effect. These weren’t fun.

You know what? That explains the popup barrage you get in Farmville every time you load. A player clicked to get rid of the popup, therefore popup dismissing must be fun! So let’s give them more popups! Oh, they dismissed those too! MORE POPUPS ALL AROUND! *pop* *pop* *pop*

David Sirlin has great GDC notes up. Particularly:

Jaime Griesemer made a point yesterday that when gets feedback, he doesn’t like hearing solutions, just problems. He’s ok with “I don’t like this” and he’s even better with “I don’t like this because [of X]” but he’s not hot on “this should be changed to that.” Often these solutions are not feasible. Sometimes they have technical problems, sometimes they cause other even worse problems in some other area of the game, or whatever. He says don’t discuss solutions with playtesters, do that with other designers.

GOOD GOD YES. Three quarters of time I have responding to feedback is trying to turn “this should be changed to that” into “I don’t like this” and almost always I think the person I’m conversing with is thinking I am just mining for a way to ignore the comment. There are dozens of ways to solve most problems in design. Your solution is probably pretty good, but unless I know the underlying problem you are trying to solve, I can’t find that one that merges so beautifully with that system or dynamic that you just don’t know about yet.

I think people make the assumption internally that if they don’t offer up a solution that they will seem dumb, especially if the solution is clear. Not so. It’s my job to understand how the systems of the game work. If you think there is a problem with one, tell me, but don’t tell me how to fix it as I am likely the one most qualified as I know the systems the best. It’s not an ego thing, but a specialization thing.

I try my best when artists show me things to respond in the same way. I try not to say “make this darker”. Instead I try to say, “that’s hard to read” or “that might obstruct this other thing”. I say “try” because it is so damn easy to fall back on doing the thinking for someone else.

Chris Hecker is my hero and has been for a few years. I worry that someday I’ll meet him and he’ll turn out to be a dick and my vision will be shattered. From GDC:

“You want to make an intrinsically interesting game,” he said of game designers at large. “[When] you add extrinsic motivators to make your game better, if these studies do apply to games, you’re destroying intrinsic motivation to play your game.”

“The game industry used to use no metrics whatsoever,” he continued. “Everything was gut and by the seat of our pants. Then metrics came around, and [now] we’re addicted to metrics. If I change a value of my purple hat, fourteen more people buy it, and we think we’re totally in the zone.”

Sigh.

I found a notebook from when I attended the Game Design Workshop at GDC in 2008 and came across the write-up of a group game we had to design. I can’t remember what the prompt was at all, but it must have been something great for us to come up with this. I recall only being given about thirty minutes to develop this and that everyone in our groups (of 6-8 people) had to be able to play, so all things considered the playtest of it turned out really well.

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Donner Party Adventure

Players: 6+

All players start with ten life points. When a player has zero life points they are dead and eliminated.

Each round two players must go on a “hunting party”. Each player votes one of the players (possibly him/herself) to go on the hunting party.

If two players (and only two) have multiple votes those two go on the hunting party. In any case where there aren’t exactly two members receiving multiple votes, all players starve and lose 1 life point.

On the hunting party, the two participants play a game of “paper-rock-scissors”. The loser loses three life points. The winner gains three points, but must give at least two of those points to players not in
the hunting party. The loser, if he is still has life points, gains a “recover” card and cannot be voted on in the next round. This card remains with that player until another player gains it.

Materials: 36 Player Cards (for voting, 6 cards with each of the six players names on them), 60 Life Tokens

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Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what happens when you get to three players as that is obviously going to either end the game or require some rules change. There was something that happened, but I cannot remember. During our playtests, it reminded me of Mafia when folks would gang up on each other to send people out on the hunting parties and then they could earn others trust by bringing them back the food. It was a pretty good (and cutthroat) game.

My pen leaked. I have Adam all over my backpack.

Looks like MTV Multiplayer agrees with me on Polarity.

The “Pax 10” list has been announced (Penny Arcade Expo’s indie games showcase) and I was glad to see Polarity representing 2D Puzzle-Platformers and Carnegie Mellon Alums. If you remember, I played it at GDC and thought it was one of the best indie games on the floor. I’m glad even more folks will be exposed to its “forces”. Rare is the student-produced game that is as polished and usable as Polarity. If you haven’t tried it, you should. The Polarity team shows how a simple idea, executed and refined can be just as compelling as a complex idea, half-explore.

I just discovered the GDC pictures that Robin Hunicke (MySims, Boom Blox) put up on her blog a few weeks ago. First, not only is she a cheerfully vibrant person that made the Game Design Workshop tolerable on what little sleep I was running on, but she is an excellent photographer. So if you want to know what the Game Design Workshop is all about, check out the photos. The extremely sparse captioning makes it even more compelling because even though I was there, I’m WTFing at some of the pictures. It looks like we all had a great time!

Removing the context from some of them made for some really compelling shots. I was looking at this one for about thirty seconds before I realized that was my handwriting. Then I remembered the card game we created from which the shot comes, but explaining it I think would take away from the beauty of the shots.

One of my favorites has to be this one of Frank Lantz (Parking Wars, Chain Factor). I guess he is psychic?

Moral of the post: go to the Game Design Workshop.