(Note: This was written for the Games of 2020 content put on by Game Developer magazine. I won a free ticket to GDC 2009.) The massive success of WiiFit was a wakeup call, not for the game industry, but for Maytag and Whirlpool. With a dash of simple game design, a simple bathroom scale outsold the most popular bathroom scales in the history of mankind by an order of magnitude. A cadre of lapsed game […]
The following essay was originally posted in ACM Journal Games: Research and Practice (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3583184) Reposted here to provide a more accessible copy with better formatting. On grim winter days it is easy to feel that we live in a predatory digital ecology intentionally designed to foster negative emotions. We prime players with mechanisms that actively generate social comparison, fear of missing out, loneliness, anxiety and polarization. Why? So our games can more easily extract their […]
A thought that has been stewing for a while is “What is a form of social media I’d be willing to use?” So here is one app design that attempts to answer the question. It helps folks create and manage small social groups focused on thoughtful writings and conversation. The joy of letter writing At one point, there were long form letters exchanged between experts in their field. Artists and writers would write to one […]
Introduction In social systems design, we often need to control how different players interact with one another. We want to heavily mediate griefing and toxicity between strangers. And we want to open up more intimate channels of communication between trusted friends so they can offer nuanced sympathy and support. “Closed” and “open” affordances are useful concepts for talking about this challenge. Here’s a brief introduction. What is an affordance? An affordance is the possibility of […]
So much mentoring I do is asking folks to treat themselves with kindness. Overwork, anxiety, external and internal pressure can put us into a dark hole. We find ourselves lacking mental resources to be playful. – Danc (This was originally a Tweet: https://twitter.com/danctheduck/status/1346832733402632193)
How do you cultivate a wildly productive generative engine of design creativity. Especially one detached from your ego? Design in this case means coming up with plans and specs for the thing you are making that fits the resource constraints. And the process of workshopping designs is where a designer coming up with multiple design solutions for the same problem and iterates upon them to better fit the constraints. Steps in the workshopping process Easy, […]
A thing I’ve realized making non-combat focused games is how expensive combat mechanics often end up being in the end. If you add combat… “The basics” to get you in the door take immense effort. Enemy design, encounter design, player design, attack/defense systems, game feel, all the art and fx. Then once you’ve got your combat system stood up, you are still competing again thousands of games that are roughly equivalent. It is the indie […]
I have a design tool I call “Don’t Solve the Hard Problem” It consists of three steps Example 1: Meaningful NPC interactions Now, people working on the hard problem of NPC AI may be upset right now. The example I just gave is SO trivial. And isn’t the problem they are pouring their lives into solving. But I didn’t have 10 years. So pivot. Solve an adjacent easier problem. It worked for our users. (BTW, […]
The joke goes: An expert game designer is 20x more effective than a newbie. They are correct 20% of the time instead of 1%. Why are game designers wrong 80% of the time? Sometimes they are wrong by a little. Sometimes by a lot. Is it poor planning? Are they morons? An expert painter does not produce a completely broken picture 80% of the time. Why is this so hard? The feedback loop for creating […]
INTRODUCTION The problem with picking up sticks Recently I was designing the harvesting and crafting system for our Animal Crossing-like game Cozy Grove when I ran into a problem: picking up a stick is not that fun. The core activities in a life sim are generally not full of mastery and depth. You chop trees. You dig holes. You pick up sticks. In isolation, each of these is dull. Our playtesters would harvest a leaf […]
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