BigCow - Slashdot User

Submission + - Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by

MarkN

on Saturday December 05, 2009 @06:35PM

MarkN writes: "Facebook has been trumpeting the fact that Farmville, the most popular game on its site, has more users than Twitter, with 69 million playing over a month and 26 million playing each day. Combined with Facebook's announcement that they have hit 350 million users, that means that one out of every five people on Facebook is playing Farmville. Gamasutra has a featured post taking a critical analysis of Farmville, its deceptively slow level grind, how a number of gameplay features end up as simply decorative since they aren't balanced with the benefits of raising crops, and discussing why Farmville succeeds so well in virally spreading itself and addicting people."

Submission + - Storytelling in Games and the use of Narration

Submitted by

MarkN

on Thursday May 07, 2009 @12:25PM

MarkN writes: "The use of story in video games has come a long way, from being shoehorned into a manual written for a completed game, to being told through expensive half-hour cut scenes that put gameplay on hold. To me the interesting thing about story in games is how it relates the player to the game, in communicating their goals, motivating them to continue, and representing their role as a character in the world. In this article I talk about some of the storytelling techniques games have employed, and in particular the different styles of narration that have been used to directly communicate information about a story, and how that affects the player's relation to their character and the degree of freedom they're given to shape the story themselves."

Submission + - Dealing with Fairness and Balance in Video Games

Submitted by

MarkN

on Monday March 09, 2009 @03:46AM

MarkN writes: "Video games are subject to a number of balance issues traditional games have largely stayed free from. It can be hard finding players of comparable skill-level to create even matchups, diverse gameplay options can quickly become irrelevant if someone finds a broken feature of gameplay that beats everything else, and some online games make your ability to play competitively a question of how much time and money you've invested in a game rather than the skill you possess. In this article, I talk about some of the issues relating to fairness and balance in games, in terms of the factors and strategies under the player's control, the game's role in potentially handicapping players, and the role a community of gamers plays in setting standards for how games are to be played. I'd be very interested in hearing the community's thoughts on managing a 'fair and balanced' gaming experience."

Submission + - Categorizing Puzzles in Adventure Games (adventureclassicgaming.com)

Submitted by

MarkN

on Sunday December 28, 2008 @05:40PM

MarkN writes: "There's hardly a video game made nowadays that doesn't involve puzzles in some sense. In some games they serve as occasional roadblocks to break up the action, and in the genre of adventure games the whole focus of the game is solving a set of related puzzles. I've written a piece for AdventureClassicGaming describing and categorizing puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games make use of explicitly designed abstract puzzles--they're explicitly designed rather than being randomly or procedurally generated, and abstract in the sense that all you need to do is figure out the right actions to perform, rather than making performing those actions be a challenge in and of itself dependent upon real-time concerns.

My classification makes distinctions at two levels: you have self-contained puzzles, which can depend upon using your basic verbs of interaction, solving some minigame based around achieving a particular configuration, or providing an answer to a riddle. On the other side, you have puzzles that require some external key: this could be an item, a piece of information, or an internal change to the game's state triggered somewhere else. From there, I talk about some of the possibilities and pitfalls these puzzles carry, as well as their use in other genres. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on the use and application of puzzles in adventure games, and games in general."

Submission + - Adventure Game Interfaces and Puzzle Theory (strangehorizons.com)

Submitted by

MarkN

on Monday December 15, 2008 @05:49AM

MarkN writes: "It seems like whenever broad topics of game design are discussed on Slashdot, a few people bring up examples of Adventure Games, possibly owing to the age and interests of our members. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on a piece I wrote on Adventure Games, talking about the evolution they underwent in terms of interfaces, and how the choice of interface affects some aspects of the puzzles and design.

My basic premise is that an Adventure Game is an exercise in abstract puzzle solving--you could represent the same game with a parser or a point and click interface and still have the same underlying puzzle structure, and required player actions. What the interface does affect is how the player specifies those actions. Point and click games typically have a bare handful of verbs compared to parser games, where the player is forced to describe the desired interaction much more precisely in a way that doesn't lend itself to brute force fiddling. It's a point Yahtzee has made in the past, he went so far as to design a modern graphic adventure game with a parser input to demonstrate its potential.

In addition to talking about the underlying concepts of the genre, the other main thing I touch on are the consequences of the simplification of interfaces--puzzles are more likely to be cracked by trying everything until it works since there are fewer possibilities for interaction. There are a few simple alternatives, requiring a number of actions in sequence, or requiring the player to achieve a more complex configuration or state to demonstrate their intent. But that can reduce the world of puzzle solving to explicit logic puzzles in order to get around the problems that more creative types of puzzles run into, since they depend upon actions that are simpler to specify. It's a topic I'd be interested to get the community's thoughts on, and what they see as the best way to craft a puzzle solving experience."

Submission + - Techniques and Styles of Video Game Music (strangehorizons.com)

Submitted by

MarkN

on Monday December 01, 2008 @03:26PM

MarkN writes: "Video Game Music has come to represent much more than just the beeps and boops of early video games that often got muted out of annoyance. It's a genre that stands on its own, stylistically and musically. It necessarily differs from typical soundtrack fare in a few important ways — it's written to accompany an activity rather than meant to be listened to passively, it is often required to loop and extend indefinitely, and it has the potential to be adaptive and respond to player feedback. In this article, I talk about some of the techniques used to make game music effective within its constraints and with all of its potential, and discuss how different styles and musical techniques can relate to the gameplay."

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