I’m always on the search for new terminology to use in the science of game design. No, I don’t mean building a game design lexicon for academics (although I’m glad someone’s trying to). What I mean is building a slang that makes me look smarter and hipper than I actually am. Fun terms: toyetic, pattern-breaking, high school problems and no man’s land.
Another one is “five-bagger”. On the UO2 team, we used to measure crazy ideas by crack-bags – a mildly silly idea got one bag of crack. An idea that made a room bust out laughing due to it’s preposterousness got the coveted five-bagger category. Only three ideas ever reached that status during the 3 year development of UO2, and no, I won’t tell you what they are. I don’t want anyone questioning the game design chops… or sanity… of my former teammates.
All that being said, I’m proud to say that I’ve managed to add the term ‘Five bagger’ to the lexicons of both companies I’ve worked at since. Still, a five-baggger can still ship. Tell me this gameisn’t a five-bagger, and yet it’s probably the most innovative game of 2004.
So what’s the new lexicon term? A “Dead Shark”, a term that Grand Text Auto comes up with, stolen from a Woody Allen movie.
A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands… is a dead shark. — Woody Allen, Annie Hall
So a ‘Dead Shark’ is an idea that can’t progress forward, and so it has to die. This term is so much more fun than ‘non-starter’, the term I was forced to bandy about before.
Got any fun terms desciribing how unpredictable players puzzle-solving skills sometimes are? That was something always very much amusing myself as GM/DM, when i saw them solving something we thought up, while gleefully thinking how hard it would be, within seconds only to nearly falling into despair because of a throw-away puzzle.
A long suffering GM here as well 😉
I always found the variations on Murphy’s Law/ Sod’s Law, appropriate to the players and situations in the game sessions held over 25 years.
‘Anything that can go wrong will, at the worst possible time.’
and
‘Nothing is foolproof as fools are so ingenious.’
Those two alone covered nearly all the situations 😉
So players with wildly unpredictable puzzle-solving skills would be Murphy’s Sods, then?