All of the late 80s-early 90s era RPG fun in about ten minutes: Synopsis Quest Deluxe. It’s a homage/parody/copy of the RPG tropes of old and really makes one think about where the fun was concentrated in those forty hour games of yore. Maybe they could be distilled down forty-fold?

(And I beat it. Woo!)

From gamasutra:

If you’re building a game to be a stand-alone, quality game: take all viral stuff out, would people play this game and enjoy it for an entire month? That’s the question you have to ask yourself and I think that most of the games, and most of the developers, hinge so much on the marketing and the virality side that it really takes away from their gameplay. So we make sure that our gameplay stands on its own,” he says. “The dedicated fan base is the buying fan base.”

But the viral stuff is part of the game, no? You can’t look at Parking Wars without its viral nature, can you?

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*

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.

Few studios will ever tell you about what they did wrong. Few studios would write a thousand words on it. Fewer still have the guts to take something that doesn’t work and totally scrap it. Few studios are Valve.

This is the first that I’ve heard the nomenclature of a “Living Card Game”, but it seems to me to improve on CCGs in every way, shape and form:

You have your customizable deck of cards that you make beforehand, before you play. It has the same type of strategy elements that you would find, the depth of play, in that every game plays out differently, the same strategy.

They differ in the fact that it’s not collectible. You know what you’re going to buy in the packages that you buy. You don’t have to chase cards to build decks. You can play with the cards that you want to play with.

Post-Dominion though, I’m not entirely sure the build-your-deck-before-the-game has much more in it.

Finally watched Jesse’s DICE speech. Amazing as always. Really inspirational and frightening. Especially to those trying to ride the Farmville wave. What he talks about is what I think Booyah Society was trying (unsuccessfully) to do.

There’s an interview with the Game of Life (Hasbro) creator on about.com of all places. The game is pretty dull by most of my personal measures, but I had a copy in my youth and I’m sure most of you did too. (As an aside, I had changed the rules when I played to something more interesting and removed some of the crummy rules – I was a game designer back then too!) Anyway, it’s hard to argue with success. I think Cranium is cringingly awful too but it sells by the truckload so obviously I am missing something.

It’s something obvious to me that Life was his first game design:

However, James Shea, Sr., president of Milton Bradley asked me if I would develop a game in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Milton Bradley Company. I immediately accepted this challenge.

But I think he is getting a little… aged when he says:

Klamer believes that The Game of Life has remained so popular for so long because it features “tremendous interaction between the players” and because players are faced with several important decisions as the game progresses.

It has nothing to do with Hasbro nee Milton Bradley’s long retailing arms combined with an attractive and colorful combination of packaging and components? I wouldn’t credit the game mechanics with its longevity, it is the theme and presentation combined with the business.

Would Life have been as popular if its presentation was as ugly and generic as Trivial Pursuit‘s?

Image courtesy BoardGameGeek

It makes me think about what digital games are successful more based on their presentation and distribution than mechanics. Do we escape this in digital because the arc of evermore engaging graphics possibilities tarnishes titles quickly and thus nothing can reach the kind of “simple hollow classic” status like Life has been?